CrossOver Support - Community Forums

The game "Pharaoh: A New Era" was released today. An Unity-Remake of an old oldschool economic simulation...

https://www.gog.com/de/game/pharaoh_a_new_era
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1351080/Pharaoh_A_New_Era/

After installing and starting it I hear the sound, see the colored mouse cursor and a loading screen for 2 seconds. The the screen remains black. The mouse cursor and the sound remain.

Are such black screens known in connection with Unity and CrossOver?

Thanks for help.

I'm having this EXACT same problem!
Please someone smarter than me help, I want to play this game so bad.

I have tested different Bottles (Win10, Win7...) with different options (CSMT, DXVK...)
Unfortunately no success so far....

Here are my settings:

MacBook Air M1, 8 GB RAM
Mac OS 13.2.1 (Ventura)
CrossOver 22.0.1

Same problem for me..
Would love to see this working.

It seems the videos are the problem. Today I tested the game on Windows. After a short loading screen (I see this on Mac OS too) the intro Video starts. It seems CrossOver is not able to play the intro video. There is no way to skip the intro video under Windows. Presumably the game waits until the video is at the end. So a game started with CrossOver waits in vain...

Any hints to solve such things like unplayable intro videos? Do I need to install any codec pack or something like that?

I couldn't find a way to skip the video.. however I installed using Parallels 18 and Windows 11 and the game runs well.
Would still like to get working in Crossover.

I have found a way to run this game on Apple Air M1. I spent many hours of digging into logs and googling, because I really wanted to play this game :).

I'm not using CrossOver application directly. Just their wine engine (WS11CX64Bit22.0.1-2) using wineskin winery. But I think that you can setup it in a same way.

Solution:

1. Switch to Windows 7 in winecfg
2. Install MS Media Foundation in Winetricks (ddls>mf).
3. Play the game :)

Tested on WS11CX64Bit22.0.1-2, Apple Air M1 and STEAM version. It works without any issue so far. (I just tried to run first mission)

CrossOver is based on Wine.

How I get the Winetricks Menu in CrossOver?

Sorry I cannot help you with that. I do not own the CrossOver application. I thought that they are supporting winetricks, but I was wrong.

However in this case it is easy to use wineskin (https://github.com/Gcenx/WineskinServer) with latest crossover wine fork.

If Microsoft Media Foundation solves this problem, and you’re using Crossover, there’s no need to use Winetricks.

Download it here:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/mediafeaturepack

Then install it into the same bottle with your game.

John M. Hammer wrote:

If Microsoft Media Foundation solves this problem, and you’re using Crossover, there’s no need to use Winetricks.

Download it here:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/mediafeaturepack

Then install it into the same bottle with your game.

With this download you get a "Windows_MediaFeaturePack_x64_1903_V1.msu" file. It seems CrossOver don't accept MSU-files as executable files.... MSU is a Windows-Update file. Even under Windows I would have no idea now how to install this

I can confirm this works in my M1 MacbookPro using Wineskin (WS11CX64Bit22.0.1-1). However every half an hour or so the game freezes and I have to force quit everything. Have you had the same issues?

I'm not quite sure if I'm using Windows 7 though (still a noob in the wine ecosystem). Perhaps that may be it.

Edit: I can confirm I am using Windows 7. Still it freezes every once in a while. Still very much playable though.
Edit #2: I installed the last DXVK Winetrick available and no more freezing. Everything works perfect.

Lebostein wrote:

John M. Hammer wrote:

If Microsoft Media Foundation solves this problem, and you’re using Crossover, there’s no need to use Winetricks.

Download it here:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/mediafeaturepack

Then install it into the same bottle with your game.

With this download you get a "Windows_MediaFeaturePack_x64_1903_V1.msu" file. It seems CrossOver don't accept MSU-files as executable files.... MSU is a Windows-Update file. Even under Windows I would have no idea now how to install this

Try doing a Google search to find an installer package with an executable. You can do that with no more difficulty than I can. Submit a help ticket with Codeweavers for additional help if you need it.

I hav the same problem as OP.
I tried CrossOver and Wineskin, with both I got the black screen (but with Mouse Cursor and Sound).
Even though i tried winetricks dlls>mf as suggested it still stays the same.
Can you reproduce that the game is working in a new bottle / wrapper?
Which steps do you take in detail?

Hopefully,
P

I managed to get this working (M1 mac using PortingKit).

Install using WS11WineCX64Bit22.0.1-2, then open settings and configure to run in Windows 7.

Open winetricks by clicking the following from the wrapper page you have just created in PortingKit:
More > Advanced tools > Open wineskin app > Tools > Winetricks

• Expand the menu for 'dlls'
• Select mf and dxvk1103_masOS
• Click 'run'

Once this is complete the game should play with no issues.

THANK YOU SO MUCH, it finally worked, only must follow exactly this instructions, otherwise it's not working

I didn't have to do any setup and the game simply worked.
I used D3DMETAL instead of DXVK in the bottle setting.

I installed game via Steam, used win10 bottle, v23.6, D3DMETAL instead of DXVK. (M2 MacbookPro 8G)
Everything was normally until start game mission. After load, the game was very lag and couldn't play.

Don't know much about this bottle stuff, but since I wanted to play this game, I thought why not give it a try?! Game plays really well while playing trough Steam, and I even got the achievement "No road, no problem; Have a cart pusher go cross country". So i guess there are less worries there nowadays? But then again, not sure about that! I'm playing on a Mac Studio M1 with D3DMetal settings on, as well as Msync on (with, if I'm correct, a Steam Bottleneck(?)). Have played 60+ hours so far, and I hope you will enjoy the same thus even more! I do hope it works for you as well, as as easy as it did for me, but can't promise anything of course. But to me it was actually simply, install within Steam and it worked as expected. Maybe try and reinstall?

Hello,

Having played this game to death back in the late 90's I was excited to see this one! I bought it in hopes it would work in crossover or parallels when it was on sale. My first try was crossover.

I was able to get the game to boot directly inside the Steam bottle after installation. (is that the correct term, bottle? I'm new to crossover as of about a month ago still and learning the correct terminology)

It takes a second or two to get the developer's screens to come up then the game goes right to the LONG cinematic. After that, the menu came up and I was playing it without any hiccups.

My steam bottle settings and system info are below:

Settings: D3DMetal / MSync
System: Macbook Pro Max M3 36gb RAM
Crossover Version 24.0.4 (24.0.4.37063)