[C3C] Civ3 on wine (mac) not working

[Tooves]

Hey, (I hope there are still people active on this). Recently downloaded my favorite game ever on my mac using wine, playonmac, and after installing everything, running the game through steam I cant get past the intro movie, I either click through it, and get a black screen (through it appears the game still functions (If i click in random positions on the screen I hear the sounds for game options being selected and can even start a new game (i can hear the music) but the screen is black so I can't play.
I tried letting the entire intro movie play and get the same result. I have searched all over for a fix, but can't seem to find one.

Anyone have a fix? my OS version is Mojave.

Moderator Action: Moved to Civ3 Macintosh forum. leif

 

[Inoé]

I am having the same issue. Did you manage to fix it? Anyone has an idea of what to do?

 

[Puppeteer]

Many months later, and from someone who has never tried to install or use Civ3 on a Mac...

Try editing Conquests.ini under /<game-location>/Conquests/ and add PlayIntro=0 under the [Conquests] section header. This should skip the intro movie and go straight to the menu.

You might also try adding KeepRes=1 in the same place. That prevents it from trying to change your native screen resolution. There is also a setting to make it windowed instead of full-screen, and that may also be worth a try, but I don't recall what that setting is and can't find it just now.

Also, I haven't messed with Wine (on Linux) in years—maybe a decade or more—but there used to be the free version and the paid version, and only the paid one included DirectX support, and Civ3 does need DirectX support. (Actually if I recall, you could compile it yourself if you knew how, but they sold the binaries with DirectX. But again, this was many, many years ago and surely Wine has evolved since then.)

Edit: It looks like the modern free Wine includes DirectX support. DirectX 9 (-like libraries) should be backward-compatible with the DirectX 8 Civ3 uses in the general sense. No idea how well that translates to reality:

From the Wine Wiki FAQ:

Wine itself provides a DirectX implementation that, although it has a few bugs left, should run fine. Wine supports DirectX 9.0c at this time. Work on DirectX 10 is underway.