CrossOver Support - Community Forums

I am trying to run a game in a smaller window and I read somewhere that Crossover can do that in the Wine Config but the checkbox for "Emulate a virtual desktop" is greyed out and I can't figure out why. I tried searching the forum and the help files but nobody else seems to be having this problem. At first I thought it was because I am using a Windows 7 bottle but a test on a Windows 10 bottle has the same result.

Please can someone help me?

Hi there,

The virtual desktop only works on Linux, so it's grayed out on Mac.

Best,
Meredith

Is there any chance to get the virtual desktop running on mac os?
On my M1 MacBook there are a lot of load games (usualy DirectDraw based) that do not run because they can not set the required desktop resolution (often 800x600 or 1024x768). They crash with either DirectDraw-Errors, SDL-Errors or the like.

On my old Linux machine I can run all of them with the help of a virtual desktop.
On my Mac my dearest games do only run In Parallels (at least a few of them) but not with CrossOver.

Is there realy no way to just use a Window of apropritate size as a virtual desktop?

Hi there,

The problem is that Apple has dropped support for certain resolutions on their newer displays. We are investigating ways to get around that, but our solution likely will not involve enabling the virtual desktop option.

Best,
Meredith

I’d assume it’s possible to get something akin to virtual desktop working within winemac.drv (Mojave + has layered backend views and is used in wine-6.18+)

But how much effort would need to go into getting this working?, lightly too much for it to be worth the effort when other things still need work.

I'm really wondering why the virtual desktop is not working now on macOS, while it did work in the past?
Edit: in the days of x11 it was...

Dominik Reichardt wrote:

I'm really wondering why the virtual desktop is not working now on macOS, while it did work in the past?
Edit: in the days of x11 it was...

winemac.drv doesn’t support virtual desktop and making that would would be externally complex so lightly won’t even happen.

winex11.drv (x11) would require bundling XQuartz and since this also doesn’t support MoltenVK and upstream said this won’t be supported.

How about something akin to Valve Proton's fshack or fullscreen hack, which replaces all video mode switches with a transparent framebuffer to native resolution upscaling? Some of the Linux Wine variants even support a hack of transparently exposing FSR 1.0 of the entire framebuffer, and listing the reduced resolutions that upscale to the native resolution as fake video modes for the app to use.

Hi there,

Proton's fshack can't be applied to CrossOver Mac, since the fshack lives in the x11 driver, and CrossOver Mac uses the Mac driver. We'd need a completely new solution, which is why we haven't come up with one yet :)

Best,
Meredith

Do we have any update with the issue? I was trying to run Heroes of Might and Magic III from GOG and it gives me DirectDraw Error DDERR_UNSUPORTED.

Ricardo Piccoli wrote:

Do we have any update with the issue? I was trying to run Heroes of Might and Magic III from GOG and it gives me DirectDraw Error DDERR_UNSUPORTED.

Try the HD mod(https://sites.google.com/site/heroes3hd/?pli=1), this will run in a window from what I tested, on the lowest resolution available. Ran great for me.

Ricardo Piccoli wrote:

Do we have any update with the issue? I was trying to run Heroes of Might and Magic III from GOG and it gives me DirectDraw Error DDERR_UNSUPORTED.

You could give cnc-ddraw a try

Extract the archive and copy the contents into the games directory, open winecfg and add a libary override for ddraw to native,builtin.

With any luck the game will launch