About a month ago, I decided (most likely thanks to Jevasi, DanTheMystFan, and all the other great people I was talking to at Mysterium this year) to get back into the world of Writing (the process of creating a custom Age for Uru), after a year-long hiatus. I returned to find the community in good health, happily churning out very high-quality ages one after another. The tool used for Writing, pyPRP (which is actually just a plugin for Blender) had improved and advanced tenfold since I last used it, now supporting animated textures, custom cameras, and something called ‘AlcScript’, which allows for simple actions to be scripted, making it easier to Write dynamic ages (my only finished age, Galamay, has no interactivity whatsoever, because when I Wrote it years ago, you had to actually write code to do that stuff…). The Guild of Writers Wiki, with its big list of tutorials, was endlessly helpful as I re-learned the little I remembered, and quickly advanced to new levels of ability.
The only problem with this Age Writing is the fact that I use a Mac, and Uru is built for Windows. The classic problem. My first solution was Dropbox, an easy file-syncing program that automatically copies files to every computer you’ve registered, every time the files are modified. This worked well enough, but I still had to wait on my network to move the files, and then move them to the Uru directory on my PC once they were synced. It worked, but it was definitely flawed.
So I began to think about another option. What if I could run Uru on my Mac? That would solve my problems, because then I could Write and test on the same machine. But how would I do it? My first thought was Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion, which both run Windows on top of OS X, meaning that the game would definitely run exactly as it would on a PC. However, a virtual machine would only cause more problems, such as the time it takes to load a virtual machine, or the lag that would be produced by running 2 operating systems. I thought about the latter problem for about two seconds before the answer hit me:
Wine. A self-referencing acronym standing for Wine Is Not an Emulator, Wine allows users of non-Windows operating systems to run .exe files meant specifically for Windows. The great thing is that it does this without having to run the entire Windows OS, just the specific parts that it needs to make the program work. This means that there’s no added lag, and programs really do run as if they were native to your own OS (in my case, Mac OS X, but it is available for Linux, OpenBSD, Solaris, and any platform you can build it on really, since it’s an open-source project).
The first thing I tried was DarWINE, a Wine project dedicated to getting Wine to work on OS X. Using the installer on the Uru Disk, I got through all of the initial installation before it gave me a strange error (Cannot find string ERROR_CANNOTLOAD), and crashed.
Next, I tried CrossOver Games, a commercial version of Wine dedicated to making Windows games work on Mac OS X and Linux. This behaved exactly as DarWINE did when I gave it the CD with the installer.
Frustrated, I thought more about my past experiences with Uru. I have found in the past that you don’t actually have to install Uru: all the installer does is unpack the data from the CDs to the hard drive. If you can get the files from another source (such as a past installation), you can simply run it without any other modifications. Perhaps the installer makes some registry changes, but they aren’t necessary for the game to run. Following this line of thought, I copied the files from my Uru install to my Mac, and tried opening UruExplorer.exe with CrossOver Games.
Presto! Flawless Uru, running directly on my Mac. Everything that worked on my PC works on my Mac, and given the fact that my PC doesn’t have speakers, the Mac can actually run Uru better than my PC!
Here’s how to do it:
- Install URU:Complete Chronicles on a PC.
- Install Drizzle, and get the No-Disc patch, flymode, OfflineKI, whatever add-ons you want. Drizzle is natively Mac-compatible, so you can always modify these settings later on.
- Make sure all of that stuff works on your PC.
- Copy all the files in your Uru directory (C:/Program Files/Ubisoft/Cyan Worlds/Myst Uru: Complete Chronicles by default) to somewhere on your Mac.
- Get CrossOver Games if you don’t already have it. The link is a trial, the full version costs $39.95 unfortunately…
Based on various reports, it seems like Crossover Games 8.0.0 works the best for Uru, newer versions can have some odd issues. You can download the trial for that here.
- Create a WinXP bottle in Crossover (“Manage Bottles” from the Configure menu).
- Programs > Run Command…
- Hit browse and locate UruExplorer.exe on your hard drive
- Save the command, to make it easier to launch again later
- Hit Run, and Uru will launch. You can ignore the error message that might pop up, Uru will launch a moment later.
You can also just find UruExplorer.exe in Finder and double-click it, Uru should launch just the same.
More pictures:
If you love Uru, but are tired of exploring by yourself, you should install Myst Online: Uru Live Again on your Mac and come play online!
