Running Rome2 On Macos
Lately, I’ve been spending quite a lot time at my friend’s because he owns Total War Rome II, a very cool game.
Suddenly, I remembered I had the DVD somewhere in my bookcase and after a bit of digging I found it. Though, since I am a diehard mac user, I had no other choice than getting it to work on macOS with wine (plus the mac version is known to suck).
Step 1 (may or may not be required for you)
If you are going to install it somewhere instead of your macOS installation disk just MAKE SURE the drive uses a filesystem different than FAT. (It does not support files of size 4GB+ and installation will fail.)
Step 2 (patching)
Here comes the funny part. As of wine-devel-4.2 and (devel-4.3), rome2 crashes before the start screen (where SEGA, INTEL and CREATIVE ASSEMBLY logos are shown in a white luminous background.)
What is more, this has been going on since I guess this happened.
How do I know?
With a look in the backtrace one will notice the last function in the stack was call_on_voice_processing_pass_start() and was called from the xaudio2_7 module.
A quick search online brought me to the link above, but what can we do now? Is there a patch available?
I don’t know, but, since this happened somewhere back in 2018 I figured that using a version of xaudio2_7 prior to that date should make it work.
(Supposedly, by reverting ONLY this patch and keeping everything as it is and building wine by yourself should give you the advantage of recent updates in xaudio and a working rome2 - but that was too much for me and my macbook.)
I downloaded xaudio2_7.dll.so from wine-staging-2.5.
I replaced the up-to-date version that shipped with wine-devel-4.2 with the one I downloaded from wine’s repo and kept the xaudio2_7.dll that resides in system32 of your .wine (or whatever your WINEPREFIX is called) as it is.
You can find the dll I used in my dropbox or download it for yourself from wine’s binary repo if you don’t trust a stranger. (Just remember that staging-2.5 works.)
That’s all! (The sound is kinda cranky but it’s the best we have. Happy Roming.)