Solar Fire 6 Forum

The installation works fine. When starting the application, the splash screen displays momentarily and then goes away. Solar Fire does not continue to load. The other parts of the application, like the Interpretations Editor, end with a runtime error saying that it cannot access the registry. Seems like it would be a relatively simple fix; to route the application to be able to modify its registry items.

Hi Danny,

Did you find any solution? I have the same problem and I have no idea how to solve it.

Thanks,
Armando

Don't know about Crossover, which I don't have, but Solar Fire Deluxe installs and runs reasonably well on Wine. I began with 0.97, and am still running it on 1.1.1 in Mandriva 2008.0 Most obvious problem is text appearing as a string of foreign characters in some dialog boxes, though I have had this problem in occasional Windows installations as well. I was able to fix it in Windows (can't remember how at the moment), but can do so in Wine. Also, there are a series of informational boxes at the top of the main screen showing date, time, etc., and clicking on any of these causes the program to disappear. Crash is not exactly the word - it's just not there anymore. However, aside from these two problems SF Deluxe installs fine and runs well. I have not tested the newest version, Solar Fire Gold, so can't vouch for that.

The URL for this product in the database is incorrect, as is the information on the company, which is Esoteric Technologies in Australia. It is still in business. The URL should be http://www.esotech.com.au/. Solar Fire is distributed by Astrolabe in the U.S. and elsewhere (www.alabe.com). Esoteric's Solar Maps, a companion program to Solar Fire, also works reasonably well. No details here, as I haven't used it in a while. Astrolabe's Nova, which is quite different from Solar Fire, works extremely well. I noticed some weirdness (don't know how else to describe it) when I first installed it in Wine 0.97, but since that time, I have used Nova without any problem whatsoever. Nova is pre-release (numbered in the high .90s) at this point.

Even though all of this is on Wine, I would think that Solar Fire, Solar Maps, and Nova should all work on Crossover, and any problems can be easily dealt with by the user and could be easily fixed by Crossover.

Danny and Arnando,

you can get Solar Fire running under Crossover by downloading MFC40.DLL (there are a few sites, Google will help) and dropping it into your Bottles' Windows system32 folder. For me this was:

/Users/allank/Library/Application Support/CrossOver/Bottles/winxp/drive_c/windows/system32

As Kenneth has found under Wine though, the fonts are still an issue. I have managed to track down that the following fonts are potentially causing the issue:

coure.fon
serife.fon
sserife.fon
smalle.fon
vgafix.fon
vgaoem.fon
vgasys.fon

Initially they could not be found, but by downloading them / hunting / scrounging from various windows install disks Crossover now finds the fonts, but simply ignores them. Here's a line from my log file:

warn:font:AddFontToList Ignoring font "/Users/allank/Library/Application Support/CrossOver/Bottles/winxp/dosdevices/c:/windows/fonts/coure.fon"/0x0

Will keep poking away and see what comes of it.