This page is about my attempts to install NWN under WINE on my MAC. I finally got this working in March 2011 and then attempted to ensure that this page focuses on the NWN actions and runes, and that my WINE page deals with installing WINE on the MAC. I returned in 2014, to try and get NWN2 working. The page consists of several sections, my initial work in 2009, and the further work when I tried to install NWN2 after my Mavericks upgrade.

The sucessful install with Winery is documented in the section called Winery 2014.

My MAC

$ unname -a
Darwin dave-levys-macbook-pro.local 13.3.0 Darwin Kernel Version 13.3.0: Tue Jun  3 21:27:35 PDT 2014; root:xnu-2422.110.17~1/RELEASE_X86_64 x86_64

$ uname -a
Darwin DaveMac.home 9.8.0 Darwin Kernel Version 9.8.0: Wed Jul 15 16:55:01 PDT 2009; 
    root:xnu-1228.15.4~1/RELEASE_I386 i386

Neverwinter Nights V1 2009

I started this in Jul 2009, and finally got it working, as far as I can tell, in March 2011. My early experiments failed when running the installer from the CD. This seemed to confirm one piece of advice from this article/tutorial at arstechnica which states that the installer fails, but the game works. The ars article documents a Linux build and it advises that one copies the game install folders from a windows install. The winehq apps db, says it will install, I need to test this and update the apps db page.

To see about installing WINE on the Mac, check out my notes on the WINE page here on this site.

After installing WINE, I copied the game folders and installations onto the Mac and then into the WINE c drive. Actually I have only copied one of the installations into the C: drive. I need to play the game a bit, but I have not added any additional DLLs, nor run/used winetricks. This comment was written after bringing the game up in a macports installed version of WINE.

I was advised at the Wine Forums, in this thread, to give Wineskin another go. I did and have written a blog about it here. To see my notes on Wineskin, you need to read the comments on the blog article. It seems I created a new wiki entry when migrating from snipsnap.

Uninstalling the Source Code Version

The MAC now needs tidying up, too many installs of WINE. Fortunately, I still have the install tree in ~/Builds and so

$ configure && make uninstall

does the trick and removes the source code installed version.

NWN2

Bioware forums has a thread NWN2: For the Mac within their NWN2 board. They seem to have a Mac Version, albeit less functional than the wintel version. My research on NWN 1, suggested that there was a PPC port to MacOS, but that for intel systems, they relied on Virtualisation vendors. It seems they reversed this poloicy for NWN2, probably because the PPC systems were no longer shipping.

2009

I installed from the CD using wine. This works OK. The appsdb page for NWN2 recommends a registry change to permit the updater to connect to the internet.

HKey_Local_Machine>Software>Obsidian>NWN2>Neverwinter>NWUpdate := 1

I try to run the game, I get the main menu when I select Play, I get an error, which talks about a missing VC80.CRT. The WINE appsdb page suggests a bunch of winetricks calls, but vcrun2005 requires cabextract. This takes me to http://www.cabextract.org.uk/, which takes me to http://www.macports.org/install.php.

See also my macports page. macport now is working on my Mac. 1 April 2011

2014

In 2014, after upgrading to Mavericks I have rebuilt the wine image using macports and using GOG as my NWN2 source; I also used  macports for winetricks and ran wine tricks for vcrun2005, directx9 and then used macports to run mono. I get the following messages.

Unable to detect a video card with hardware 3D acceleration
Neverwinter Nights 2 requires a video card that supports this, please make sure that it's enabled.

….

Hardware 3D acceleration appears to be disabled. If your video card supports hardware 3D acceleration then please make sue it's enabled.

I asked at winehq, dxdiagn was suggested, but it became clear that I was not invoking wine correctly since I was using Winery ( See Wineskin ) to run the game. Macports and Winery are in separate sandboxes and I wanted to continue with Winery. The WineHQ pages state that they don’t support winery.  My winehq correspondent points at this bug.

Winery 2014

The WineHQ pages state that they don’t support winery so I find this page, and this one at the winerey.

So fact No 1., Winery has its own winetricks & No 2 the engine is the wine build source. I read the appdb NWN2 page, created a wrapper, and used its wine tricks to install “devenum.dll” and “dxdiagn.dll” and directx9 and vcrun2005. I used the registry editor to check the registry setting recommended on the app db page. This works well it would seem.

The WineHQ pages state that they don’t support winery so I find this page, and this one at the winerey. My winehq correspondent points at this bug. It seems that wineskin provides its own wine/windows image. This is what the engine is, this page documents how to use the registry editor and also winetricks. See the encapsulated quote above, it documents the appdsdb and the winetricks calls required to make NWN2 work properly.

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