Civ3 - GOG - Porting Kit - No text - Buttons unusable

[pooslein]

Hi All,

I'm writing this on behalf of my 83-year-old mother who loves playing Civ3 (for 2 decades now!) but now can't, for the reasons set out below, and seeks your excellent help.

She has an iMac 2022 Apple M1 using Sequoia 15.0.
I downloaded Porting Kit. No problem.
I signed her up to GOG, logged in to GOG on Porting Kit and installed Civ3. No problem.
As advised on numerous forums I amended the conquests.ini file to add PlayIntro=0 and KeepRes=1. No problem.
As advised by Paulthetall (of Porting Kit), I used his workaround with RDM to add the 2 extra resolutions he recommended to the monitor. No problem.

However, when we try to play Civ3 we get the Main Menu page but:
(1) There is absolutely no text visible on the menu (not even the copyright notice);
(2) If I click on any of the buttons, it briefly shows a 'loading bar' and then I get the opening scene (i.e. a single worker on a small area of green, surrounded by black) including the various game play buttons, text boxes, etc, but again there is no text and none of the game buttons work. However, in front of all this is a box with a FATAL ERROR message: 'Unable to allocate draw-buffer; terminating program.', with an OK button. If I click on OK, nothing happens and the message remains.

The only way to quit the game is to Force Quit 'wine32on64-preloader'.

I also saw lots of advice to rename the LSANS.fot file in conquests.ini, but that has made no difference as a new LSANS.fot file is immediately created next time we try to launch the game.

I tried copying the LSANS.tff files into all the various Fonts folders in the Civ3 package: all this achieved was that the copyright message appeared on the main menu.

Having spent 2 days trying every possible search term on every possible forum, I am at a loss as to how to make this work.

I have no doubt one of you wonderful experts will spot something - probably tiny - that I have failed to do, and I'd much appreciate your help a.s.a.p. (as I leave my mum to head home in a few days).

With many many thanks,

pooslein's son

 

[Civinator]

Holy moly, a 83-year-old mother who loves playing Civ3! Unfortunately I cannot help here, as I don´t have a mac. The reason why I post here, is to tell you, that CFC has an own Civ 3 forum for macintosh users: https://forums.civfanatics.com/forums/civ3-macintosh.59/

May be it´s a good idea to post your question there, too.

Edit: I made a search at CFC and it seems this error message appeared by a lot of pc users, too:

Search results for query: Unable to allocate draw-buffer; terminating program

A moderator made a post, that ATARI has a patch just for that error, but unfortunately that link is not working any longer:

Unable to allocate draw buffer?

I AM SO FREAKING MAD I HAVE TO RETYPE THIS. But anyways, when I open Civilization III: Conquests, there's no text whatsoever. No "new game", "quit", etc. So I press enter. It takes me to a text-less area of configuring a new game. I keep pressing enter. It takes me to where you start playing...

forums.civfanatics.com

 

[pooslein]

Thanks for that. I have posted on the Civ3 Mac forum as suggested

Many thanks,

pooslein's son

 

[BlackBetsy]

I think it's great your Mom is still playing! One solution is to run Civ 3 on a virtual machine on the Mac using an old operating system like Windows XP and then have her just play w/in the Virtual Box. I do it so that I can run an old utility (MapFinder) and the game plays perfectly within the box. It's all free, and since its running an old OS you don't have to update, and presumably you are just running Civ on it, it's pretty safe from outside problems.

Edit: you may need another piece of software for the Mac - I just looked at a forum that says Virtual Box doesn't work anymore for Mac, you need to run Parallels or another virtual machine application.