Setup Earth 2150 game on macOS thru WINE

About Game

Earth 2150 is a nice game from 2000.

I had CD versions of Earth 2150:

• Earth 2150: Escape from the Blue Planet
• Earth 2150: The Moon Project
• Earth 2150: Lost Souls

I tried to install these versions on wine on my Mac OS X and they have multiple issues. Some of them related to game itself and some of them related to wine.

A day ago I bought Earth 2150 bundle from GOG for $5.99. These versions are working much better.

GOG version has these files (just english and russian here as an example, there are more languages available on website):

• setup_earth_2150_2.8.7.1_(16406).exe
• setup_earth_2150_russian_2.8.7.1_(16406).exe
• setup_earth_2150_-_the_moon_project_2.1.0.1_(16261).exe
• setup_earth_2150_-_the_moon_project_russian_2.1.0.1_(16261).exe
• setup_earth_2150_-_lost_souls_2.1.0.1_(16404).exe
• setup_earth_2150_-_lost_souls_russian_2.1.0.1_(16404).exe

GAME issues

• I saw reports that game could crash on some screen resolutions, but it works for me for 2560×1600 (16:10)
• CD versions can’t work on resolutions higher than 1920×1080. GOG version has no such issue.

I solved problem with high resolution 2560×1600 by using GOG version.

WINE issues

• non working music
• non working video
• crashes
• internet play?

I found solution for all issues and would like to share my experience.

WINE installation

• Install brew: https://brew.sh
• Install wine: brew install wine
• Install winetricks: brew install winetricks

Game installation

For CD version you will need to either use real CD-ROM and replace disks during installation or mount ISO images with OS X and use WINEARCH=win32 winecfg to mount as D:\ (or any other drive) different images mounted in OS X.

Please skip DirectX and DirectMusic installation if you are installing game from CD (using custom install type). Feel free to select videos and animations – there are working well with properly configured WINE environment.

This game works under WIN32, so put export WINEARCH=win32 into your ~/.bash_profile or prefix each command with WINEARCH=win32.

If you would like to use Russian version then also prefix commands with LC_ALL=ru_RU.UTF-8 otherwise Russian text in configuration utility will be unreadable.

Clear WINE setup (make sure that you don’t have anything important in this folder): rm -rf ~/.wine

GOG install (English):

WINEARCH=win32 wine ~/"setup_earth_2150_2.8.7.1_(16406).exe"

GOG install (Russian):

WINEARCH=win32 LC_ALL=ru_RU.UTF-8 wine ~/"setup_earth_2150_russian_2.8.7.1_(16406).exe"

Fixing WINE

Earth 2150 requires:

• native DirectMusic (including quartz.dll)
• amstream.dll
• Cinepac Codec from Radius (iccvid.dll)
• Indeo 5 Codec (for Moon Project and Lost Souls)

Install

winetricks directmusic 
winetricks amstream 
winetricks cinepak
winetricks icodecs

While winetricks should register all libraries sometimes it doesn’t work, but you could manually register them:

WINEARCH=win32 wine regsvr32 quartz.dll
WINEARCH=win32 wine regsvr32 amstream.dll

Note: cinepak is going to be added with my Pull Request but if won’t be then you could install it manually.

Manual Cinepak installation:

• Open: http://www.probo.com/cinepak.php
• Download: http://www.probo.com/pub/cinepak/cvid32.zip
• Unpack
• Copy ICCVID.DLL to ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/iccvid.dll (remove already existing wine stub version)
• Run WINEARCH=win32 winecfg and add library override “*iccvid” as “native”

Running Game

GOG English:

cd ~/".wine/drive_c/GOG Games/Earth 2150"
# game
WINEARCH=win32 wine earth2150
# configuration
WINEARCH=win32 wine setup

GOG Russian:

cd ~/".wine/drive_c/GOG Games/Earth 2150"
# game
WINEARCH=win32 LC_ALL=ru_RU.UTF-8 wine earth2150
# configuration
WINEARCH=win32 LC_ALL=ru_RU.UTF-8 wine setup

Bundle

The next step could be is to completely separate wine environment targeting Earth 2150 and other games.

You could rename ~/.wine to ~/.wine-earth2150 and use WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-earth2150 to let know wine that you would like to use another wine environment.

Another thing you could do is to create an OS X application bundle that will launch your game with wine with one click: Earth 2150.app

This script appify could be used to create a bundle: https://gist.github.com/oubiwann/453744744da1141ccc542ff75b47e0cf

This script could be used to convert PNG icon into ICNS icon that could be used for macOS application bundle if you need: https://gist.github.com/sormy/38ef6163c071bd6a64fc61759ad6d942

Earth 2150 has an icon provided by GOG. It has ICO format but you could extract 256×256 PNG from it thru imagemagic (that could be installed thru brew)

Whenever you will modify app bundle files please don’t forget to touch it touch "Earth 2150.app". This will force macOS to clear internal cache and reload icon and application configuration.

Example of shell script runner in application bundle could look like below (use full path!!!):

#!/usr/bin/env bash

WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=/Users/sormy/.wine-earth2150 LC_ALL=ru_RU.UTF-8 /usr/local/bin/wine 'C:\GOG Games\Earth 2150\Earth2150.exe'

Conclusion

I found that Earth 2150 GOG Edition work pretty well on my MacBook Pro Retina 13″ with OS X within WINE with resolution 2560×1600.