Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri Forum

Hi,

I am trying to get Alpha Centauri to work, and it just doesn't. I have tried W98, W2K, and XP. I have tried with and without the 2000/XP patch. I have edited the .INI file and switched the ForceOldVoxelAlgorithm, DirectDraw, Video Mode and DisableOpeningMovie settings to many different combinations.

I made it past the "terran.exe has encontered a problem and must close" error on startup.
The game launches, and plays the opening movie. The sound works, but I get no video after that - just a black screen. I can press the <return> key to press the default buttons without seeing them and the <esc> key to quit. During the exit sequence, I see a brief flash of a logo.

Any help would be appreciated!
Rich

PS.
Here's more info that may be useful...
I'm using the latest version of Crossover, which is 11.3.1 at the moment.
I'm running MacOS 10.6.8 on a quad core i5.
I'm using the Alpha Centauri CD installer from Sold Out Software, released in 2009.

Here's something really useful - I got it to work 😊

on my mac, with most recent version of crossover (12.1.1) I
1) installed Platform SDK Redistributable: GDI+
2) installed GOG version of Alpha Centauri with Alien Crossfire
3) using regedit, added HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Wine/Direct3D/DirectDrawRenderer=gdi (see http://wiki.winehq.org/UsefulRegistryKeys for slightly more detailed instructions)
4) turned on "Experimental Mac Driver" (advanced tab of the bottle)
5) ran Alien Crossfire

I'll try to remember to make a tie file when I get a moment

I had some troubles with the sound, where some sounds (such as the ocean and movement sounds) would play as clicks. Apparently this is a problem with the way wine plays the 22kz wav files. If you have a copy of the GOG mac version, you can copy the contents of the fx folder from the GOG version over the top and that made it work for me.
Alternatively, if you're super keen you could transcode the wav files into a format that wine likes better.