Can I emulate EE on Mac?

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Shaohao
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Can I emulate EE on Mac?

Post by Shaohao »

Hi!

Please forgive me if it was already mentioned somewhere. I couldn't find it for the life of me. Is it possible to play Empire Earth on Mac? I have an AirBook 13 and I would love to be able to install and enjoy EE2 but I have no idea how to do it. Is there a mod? Or an emulator? I am doing my best but I am not the greatest technician in the world. Thank you!

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Re: Can I emulate EE on Mac?

Post by Dr.MonaLisa »

Hello. Sorry for late reply. I saw the topic but I forgot to reply in the morning.

EE2 is a Windows game, compiled for x86 processors architecture (32bit).
MacBook Air 13 seems to use the "Apple M1" or "Apple M2" chip, which is a processor with ARM architecture.

So it's not only difference with the operating system (which could be emulated using some Wine), but also a different processor architecture.
In older version of Mac Books they used the Intel x64 processors, so it was possible to run Windows on MacBooks. That was the best solution as it wouldn't affect the performance. When the CPU architecture differs fully, it's most likely that even if the game was somehow emulated using third-party tools - it wouldn't be stable. For example the game could start correctly, but crash after few minutes. So I'm not sure if it's even worth the efforts trying to run this game on your laptop.

There's hope that Windows 11 is going to be released for ARM processors one day. This would allow you to run Windows on your Mac, and then Windows would emulate the 32bit application to run on it correctly. I'm not sure about the releases date of it, but I think it was announced a while ago.
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Re: Can I emulate EE on Mac?

Post by Rob A »

@Dr.MonaLisa

Any updates to this post? I have a new MBP 16" and looking to make it work via a VM. I was able to load it up using Paul The Tall's porting kit but crashed pretty quickly. Now looking to make is work with VMWare Fusion Pro and either Windows 10 or 11. I'll let you know how I go but thought I'd check back to see if you've anyone else make it work.

Also - are you coding for and/or supporting the Empire Eternal effort? I'm curious as I think they'd be best off just paying you; you've already built it!

Keep up the great work, thanks!

- Rob A.
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Re: Can I emulate EE on Mac?

Post by Dr.MonaLisa »

Hi Rob.

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), I never used MAC so I don't really know. I can only provide some tips based on what I read from other players, but that's all.

When it comes to the other projects, I only make Unofficial Patch, nothing else. I can not join anything else, as EE2 is already very time consuming, basically not even leaving time for playing other games. When it comes to the other game "clones", I'm not a fan of such things, as I am the vanilla EE2-fanatic. No matter what, there won't be the other similar game to EE2, so it's important to focus on it, and make it survive as long as possible.
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Re: Can I emulate EE on Mac?

Post by goldgoblin »

Hi :)

I have got EE2 running on a Mac (16" 2021 M1).

I used Crossover (3) and installed EE2 into the bottle (which has wine) and this worked okay but you need an external monitor as it doesn't like the new Mac displays.

Then I installed the unofficial patch from Dr.Mona Lisa and then the bottle was able to run EE2 on the Mac's own display.

It's not perfect, it does crash after about an hour - but I'm still playing with the settings!

You might also be able to get it running using parallels instead of crossover, but I'm not as familiar with parallels.

Anyway, hope some of that is helpful!
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Re: Can I emulate EE on Mac?

Post by Dr.MonaLisa »

Thanks for the information!

Do you by any chance experience issues described e.g. in this post? viewtopic.php?p=28090#p28090

For display issues, it's usually (but not always) also good to use the Borderless Windowed Mode (a switch available in UP1.6 Settings). I personally moved to this mode already few months/years ago, because it's way easier to switch between game and the other processes. Also, it seems not to have any bugs anymore and works simply flawlessly.
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