Running STO through Wine

ironcaniac

Can someone who currently plays STO on a Mac through Wine explain what the basic steps are in getting it all to work? I've read the FAQs on the Wine website but it all looks pretty confusing, at least to me. I have no idea what a binary package is or why there's two branches of them. Also, after downloading/installing Wine, are there any extra steps other than downloading the Windows STO launcher?

Any guidance would be greatly appreciate by myself (and other Mac users I'm sure) as it's literally the only way we'll be able to continue playing STO. Thank you!

elbeavers

I second this. I had to delete STO Mac client to make room for Wine and a new client. (tsk tsk, I know I need to upgrade for space, or delete a lot of other stuff). I got the Arc client installed, but it crashes when I try to install STO. I'm missing out on a my Krenim ship!

carcosa

Wait, I thought Mac users could play now just by downloading the game... why do you need Wine? I'm trying to get a friend of mine to play and he's on Mac... what do you recommend?

nebfab

@carcosa, Mac support ended on the 5th. The thread is still in the announcements.

Anyway, Wine can be a complicated beast and I'm not familiar with how exactly it works on Macs, but there is a wrapper program, PlayOnMac, which as I understand is a sister project to PlayOnLinux which I use to run my Windows games on Linux and there it works great.

I can't say anything about the quality of either PlayOnMac or its specific support for STO, but it may definitely be worth a try.

twg042370

A couple of years ago when I was thinking of jumping to Linux but before I went to Korea and couldn't play at all, my brother, who is a giant Linux nerd, couldn't get STO to run without ARC and ARC wouldn't run at all.

WINE HQ shows the same problem I had is common even now so I don't think the situation has gotten better.

https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=19203

Some folks in the comments suggest running it through Steam instead of ARC, so that might be an option.

Another money-type option is to buy a cheapo laptop with Win-d'oh!s and make it your dedicated MMO machine.

nebfab

WineHQ reviews should be taken with a healthy pinch of salt. I don't claim that this is true in this particular case (Again, no Mac here,) but I sometimes saw an app with ton of negative reviews actually working quite well and even without any complicated setup.

PlayOnLinux version downloads the old pre-Arc, pre-Steam launcher from somewhere, and while it's sort of wonky on my system (It often crashes just before opening the game) it's usable.

noroblad

I can help with terms a little.
A long time ago, someone at bell labs got really, really confused. It was probably like 2 am, and he was out of coffee and doughnuts. In his addled state, he decided that there was a difference between text files and binary files (all files are binary, as is pretty much anything computer related; text is just a binary file that happens to only have specific values in the bytes). This was not confusing enough, so he also declared that binary files should be a misnomer for executable files and/or executable library code and similar stuff. And it was so.

So a binary package is nothing more than what windows would call a "DLL" or more generically, a software library file.
Typically you only have one current version of a library, but if you mix old software and new software, you sometimes need an old copy for an old program and a new copy for a newer program. This is why you have versions of them. Its like driver versions etc on windows... sometimes the latest one doesnt work so you go back one.

WINE is just a virutal machine for windows. It should behave exactly like booting a windows computer except about 20 times slower because you are now running the fat and heavy windows operating system on the fat and heavy mac operating system while running a game on top of THOSE. So it should just work if you simply install the WINE emulator and fire up STO inside it. The operative word there being "should". It probably won't. I tried it for a bit and wine almost never worked on any real software without tons of hands-on fooling with it. This is still preferable and better in every way than just using a windows machine where you simply double click the STO launcher and play; I have that on the highest authority.

nebfab

noroblad wrote: »

I can help with terms a little.
A long time ago, someone at bell labs got really, really confused. It was probably like 2 am, and he was out of coffee and doughnuts. In his addled state, he decided that there was a difference between text files and binary files (all files are binary, as is pretty much anything computer related; text is just a binary file that happens to only have specific values in the bytes). This was not confusing enough, so he also declared that binary files should be a misnomer for executable files and/or executable library code and similar stuff. And it was so.

So a binary package is nothing more than what windows would call a "DLL" or more generically, a software library file.
Typically you only have one current version of a library, but if you mix old software and new software, you sometimes need an old copy for an old program and a new copy for a newer program. This is why you have versions of them. Its like driver versions etc on windows... sometimes the latest one doesnt work so you go back one.

WINE is just a virutal machine for windows. It should behave exactly like booting a windows computer except about 20 times slower because you are now running the fat and heavy windows operating system on the fat and heavy mac operating system while running a game on top of THOSE. So it should just work if you simply install the WINE emulator and fire up STO inside it. The operative word there being "should". It probably won't. I tried it for a bit and wine almost never worked on any real software without tons of hands-on fooling with it. This is still preferable and better in every way than just using a windows machine where you simply double click the STO launcher and play; I have that on the highest authority.

Wine is not an emulator (it's right there in the name) since it doesn't emulate Windows box all the way up from the CPU, nor is it a virtual machine, since it doesn't need actual Windows OS to work. It's essentially an independent implementation of WinAPI using common *nix libraries and code that loads and executes .dll and .exe files. This approach has its issues, namely that it doesn't always do exactly what a "real" WinAPI call would do in identical circumstances, and yes, it's extremely fiddly. But as far as performance goes, there's nothing like "20 times" slowdown.

As for "binary..." In this context it's usually contrasted to "source" and for that one we should thank certain admiral Grace Hopper, not Bell Labs. Basically a "source package" contains files that are human-readable and editable, and is used by developers while a "binary" is the source processed into final ready to install form (and is only completely readable by computers and a few thousand people who can read X86 code without a disassembler or any such tool) but which is much more friendly to end user.

ADD: That said, I stopped bothering about OS wars a decade ago... If you have got or can afford a Windows machine, that's indeed the best option. It just so happens that I need Linux for certain other things I do besides gaming, and I just can't justify spending on Windows, but this may change.

noroblad

^^ This is true. I was being a bit whimsical and attempting to answer it with some humor. Meaning 20 times was an exaggeration, but it is notably slower. In reality its between 1x and 2x slowdown, difficult to compare because the hardware isnt always comparable to form a real baseline.

And yes, wine is more like google translate than a real VM. And about as effective

I agree about paying for windows. I typically get a bare-bones system that includes it, upgrade the ram and graphics card, dual boot it to linux, and call it good for 5 years. Ive been a mac fan since os x came out (before that, not so much) but as a gamer, I get windows at home.

All that aside, if the OP wants to game under wine, hes going to have to get under the hood a bit, read up on what is needed for each game to get it working, and worse for stuff like STO, every few patches are going to require tinkering. Thats just how it is.