dsj4 on mac?

[Roman Fendt]

Is it possible to run dsj4 on mac either with an emulator or with a installed windows version?
Thanks for answers.

[MJumper]

It is sort of possible to run DSJ using wine (http://www.winehq.org/) or a third party wine environment such as wineskin.

There are (at least) two problems with DSJ4 and wine:

1: jumper is not displayed correctly, this only affects visuals but makes it very hard to jump. Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5jWNK98KUU.
On OSX it looked even worse.

2: mouse doens't work correctly. Wine only supports absolute mouse movement (I think) and since mouse can't
leave the screen during the game you can only pull it down a certain ammount and after that jumper is locked into position.
I had to learn to remember to move cursor all the way up before each jump. Also, system mouse sensitivity affects
gameplay (a lot) when running DSJ in wine/X11.

Having said that, I still managed to improve some of my hill records and maintain an online rating of around
900 under these circumstances. This was during beta 2.

I guess there should be no problem running DSJ4 using something like virtualbox but you need a
legitimate copy of windows for that.

[Roman Fendt]

Haha , after that video I can seriously say that it sucks playing it with an emulator. That idea with patitionating my macbook with an windows version already came into my mind, but I´m afraid that the keys won´t work correctly on windows, so that it´s not possible to zoom or to change gate. Do you have any experience with that?

[MJumper]

On wine, all the keys seemed to work fine, ctrl was ctrl, alt/option was alt and command+up/down was page up/down.
I suppose they should work in a virtual environment/windows partition as well and it might be possible to configure these buttons, but I'm not sure.

Are you going to install windows on a separate partition/boot camp or in a virtual machine (virtualbox/parallels desktop/VMWare, etc.)?
You could look around at the apple forums for questions like this. Or if you already have windows installed you could
just try the demo and see if it works.

Right now it's definately not worth bying DSJ4 only for wine and I suspect it will take at least a few years before it will be,
if it ever will. But then again, I'm not sure if it's worth purchasing windows just for DSJ.
Almost all other programs I have tried have worked great with wine, in some cases even better than in windows.

Hope this helped.

[Roman Fendt]

I´ll try to install windows via boot camp, I hope it´ll work. I think I have some windows versions somewhere at home...
I already prepurchased the full version (had a windows laptop but all usb-ports are crashed and it sucks gaming with a mousepad), so thats not the poit, but thanks for your fast replies.

[Mats]

Hey^^

In addition to the wine-bug I just want to mention that I tried to play DSJ4 on Linux using a Windows-VM and even that ended with the same bug seen in the video posted by MJumper...

[Roman Fendt]

I´ll try my best to solve this problem, if I found a solution I will let you guys know...

[MJumper]

@Mats

Which VM are you using? I tried this once on virtualbox with the windows 8 developer's preview and that bug did not occur, however the game ran very slowly because I couldn't configure the VM to use my graphics card.
On virtualbox you have to install guest additions which I think will allow you, amongst other things, to let the VM
use your actual hardware. Also, you have to play around with the VM settings. I only have brief experience with
virtualbox and no other VM so I'm not sure what causes this, but if the bug is not present in windows I'd think it shouldn't appear in a properly set up windows running inside a VM.

Did you have directX installed?

[sado1]

Hey^^

In addition to the wine-bug I just want to mention that I tried to play DSJ4 on Linux using a Windows-VM and even that ended with the same bug seen in the video posted by MJumper...

I'm quite sure that's because Virtualbox (which you probably used, then) uses DirectX .dll's from Wine project. Virtualbox developers just added support for OpenGL emulation to their app, and handled DirectX emulation by using Wine's DirectX DLLs. Wine emulates DirectX by "translating" DirectX calls into OpenGL, because obviously DirectX doesn't work on Linux but OpenGL does. So, in result, you get the Wine bug on Virtualbox as well. These DLLs get swapped when you install Guest Additions ticking "Experimental 3D" option - that's why MJumper didn't have that bug.

There's no solution other than waiting for Wine developers to fix the bug (there's some DirectX feature lacking in Wine, Jussi pasted the bug report once) or fix it / workaround somehow by ourselves (any programmers out there? )

[MJumper]

I'm quite sure that's because Virtualbox (which you probably used, then) uses DirectX .dll's from Wine project. Virtualbox developers just added support for OpenGL emulation to their app, and handled DirectX emulation by using Wine's DirectX DLLs. Wine emulates DirectX by "translating" DirectX calls into OpenGL, because obviously DirectX doesn't work on Linux but OpenGL does. So, in result, you get the Wine bug on Virtualbox as well. These DLLs get swapped when you install Guest Additions ticking "Experimental 3D" option - that's why MJumper didn't have that bug.

Ah, I didn't know virtualbox used WineD3D. Well that would indeed explain it. I guess I just assumed it
needed the guest additions for it to work so I didn't even try it without it.

There's no solution other than waiting for Wine developers to fix the bug (there's some DirectX feature lacking in Wine, Jussi pasted the bug report once) or fix it / workaround somehow by ourselves (any programmers out there? )

Hopefully someone with 3D knowlegde, then.
If I understood correctly, this bug had something to do with at thing called "fixed function pipeline vertex blending" (correct me if I'm wrong with any of this). As I understood it, newer graphics cards don't support this so these things are probably emulated somehow in directX but
not in WineD3D. Last time I checked the discussions on the wine forums, the hopes of this being implemented in the near future
were very small, and that discussion has pretty much not been touched since 2009. I'll provide a link to this discussion if I can find it again.

EDIT: this should help find most of the discussions.

And by the way, as Jussi already pointed out, the patches for wine bug 6955 or any of the other fixes on that page don't seem to help (at least when I tried them).
Does Cedega have a different direct3d implementation? Has anyone tried the game on Cedega?

[sado1]

Gametree (Cedega under a new name) is a dead end now, it isn't updated anymore. I can't even make it to install any app. Try by yourself if you want, it's free now.

[Zettabyte]

Bootcamp will work (if you have an iMac). But might be too much of a hassle to boot in Windows every time you want to play the game. O.o