HOW-TO: Play Project 1999 on a Mac

[Baldtree00]

Where you able to get this figured out. Im on a mac and I can not for the life of me get this going.

[dabbill]

I have not been playing p99 lately. I did get it to work decently. VMWare Fusion is free for personal use. Use that and install Windows ARM. When you create a VM for the first time in VMWare Fusion it asks if you want to download and install Windows ARM. Once the VM is up and running. Install the VMWare guest tools and reboot. Then copy p99 folder over to the VM.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za2CyrxKYFs

[Baldtree00]

Im on a newer mac and what to get this going. Any suggestions? I am reading older threads and not sure if they are still viable?

[Alias]

I have played on mojave using the old wine setup for years, 2015 mbp. Maybe viable not sure if the new hardware will run mojave well.

[dabbill]

I ended up using VMWare fusion with Windows ARM VM. EQ runs prefect.
Check out that YouTube video if you need help. VMWare made Fusion free for personal use, and when you create your first VM it asks you if you want to download and use Windows. I just followed through with installing windows. Made a local user account, not a Microsoft account. Then copied EQEmu folder to the VM.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9TUIVDUjto

[Dundrige]

Hi everyone. I am running Project 1999 on my new m4 iMac in Parallels 20 and everything works great in fullscreen mode, but the game is just a little dark and I can't adjust the gamma. Any fix?

[captainzero]

Originally Posted by Dundrige [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Hi everyone. I am running Project 1999 on my new m4 iMac in Parallels 20 and everything works great in fullscreen mode, but the game is just a little dark and I can't adjust the gamma. Any fix?

I got everything to run perfect on my M4 macbook air with VMware fusion. I have the issue the night time is still extremely dark, even as a half elf. Did you find any way to increase the gamma?

[SwordNboard]

Extra details to do during, or after, setup for a sure-fire launch, every time, on Apple Silicon:

Also install WinEQ2 to your wrapper. Copy the WinEQ2 install exe to your wrapper like you did with the game files. You can run the setup exe by re-configuring your wrapper and pointing it to the WinEQ2 setup exe.

Reconfigure your wrapper yet again to run WinEQ2.exe itself.

Set your WinEQ2 preferences, pointing it to eqgame.exe within the wrapper.

*IMPORTANT* Especially if you are getting the 'no graphics' or 'black graphics' issue like me:

When copying the latest patch files into your wrapper's EQ directory, go into each folder individually and copy the new files into the corresponding folder in your wrapper. If you copy the whole parent folder into your wrapper folder, it inherits that file structure, removing some of wrapper's files. Hence no graphics.

Get that old, special dsetup.dll (if needed).

Launch via WinEQ2 systray.

Enjoy.

--

YMMV as far as performance goes depending on your Apple chip. Since EQ is a 32-bit single threaded/core game, it will bottleneck itself. There is a ton of overhead with the translation layers from 32bit > 64bit > ARM. Example: My 2020 M1 chip will have a system resource usage of ~15% CPU, but the wine process running EQ will be at 150% CPU / 25% GPU. I have tried and tried to break this barrier, but there is simply nothing to be done about this. Later chips will likely handle this better. Some spots in the game are worse than others: KC castle ent, WL, BW, etc.

If you find some magical setting within Sikarugir (Wineskin), Winetricks, or the eqclient.ini to ease this, let us all know.

Cheers.

[Jayoda]

Any still use this now days ? [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I've tried how ever every time I start wineskin it just says busy and does not progress .. any ideas?

Trying on old school MacOS Monterey MacBook Air 13 inc 2017. 8gig ram, intel HD Graphics 6000 1536MB

[darkvane]

Adding a "full" install comment to this thread. Crossover running on Apple M3 Pro Sonoma.

Sure. Open (double click) all the ISO files for titanium (there should be five). They should show up as new disks. Once you have crossover installed, go install a new application. Choose Everquest.. Unless you have anything else setup with a bottle (the container that windows stuff and your app go into) it will automatically create a new bottle called Everquest. Change the installer location (top button on the right). When that dialog opens, go to disk 1 and select the installer (install.exe). It will start installing and ask you some questions. Just take the defaults. It will then ask you to select Disk 2, then Disk 3,4,5 and finally back to disk 1. At the end, it may say something about having an issue, tell it to "skip that step". Now you should have two Everquest things in home. Select the bottle it created (on the left, probably called Everquest). Once selected, on the right, click "Run Command". Click Browse, navigate to "Program Files (x86)Sony/Everquest" and select the batch file "Launch Titanium.bat". At the bottom, click "Save command as launcher" and just wait... It takes a few seconds. You should see it pop up in the Crossover screen in the background. The icon will also show up in your Mac Launchpad. Close all the disk files (no more reason for them to be open).

Before you run it, you need to go download the updates for P99 from the main wiki. DO NOT just drop the folders and files into the Everquest folder (if you get files missing when you run it, you probably did this. Start over. You need to copy the files into the right folders manually. So get al the files from the main folder, copy them, and paste into the main folder (you should replace files when it asks, and this is the same for all files). Go into the next folder, copy the files, and paste them into the proper folder in the deployment. Keep doing this until you have copied over all of them. You can find the folder by "open C: drive" when selecting the Bottle in Crossover.

You can start EQ by clicking that icon either in Crossover, or from your Mac launchpad. If you get an error about not being able to attach, just close everything, and go back to Launchpad and click the Launch Titanium icon again. Sometimes it takes a few times.