BMS on Mac Studio through Crossover
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I just tried to install BMS on my Mac Studio (Mac OS Sanoma), but I can’t get it to work.
BMS and the updates install without any problem, the launcher starts, I have to pick a callsign, but then it crashes.
I was an Avid Falcon 4.0 player at the day, I was so excited to see that something like BMS exists, so I’m looking forward to play it again!
Any help, what did I do wrong?
Thanks!
Dave -
If BMS will run under the ARM version of Win 10 (or 11) you may want to try Parallels and see if you get any better result. They have a free 14 day trial, so you could give it a spin before you buy.
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I know @ohommes used crossover on OSX…
I don’t know about configuration specifics
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@MaxWaldorf - I know Crossover works veery well on the Intel chipset, but the ability to use it with M2 Macs is certainly news to me…I’ll have to look around on this one.
Parallels runs an ARM version of Windows in a virtual machine, which would seem like a more direct operation…IF BMS/Falcon will run on ARM version Windows.
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@Stevie
I have not tried this myself but the M2 Macs can run Intel code with the Rosetta layer and because M2 are so much faster then any Intel on the planet you can actually just simulate the Intel with the Rossetta layer then run CrossOver for Intel and then Intel BMS. M2s are that fast. See some online games that run this way at high framerates.What would be better to try is actually get a Windows ARM version of BMS and that will open up new options: You can run natively on the M2 ARM when starting with BootCamp tp Boot into Windows ARM or MacOS or you can run BMS ARM in VMWare or Parallels for M2.
Building for Windows ARM should be the same as for Intel given you have the build env and a Windows ARM dev machine.
I only get about 45 FPS in VMWare on my Intel Mac and 120FPS in CrossOver on the Intel Mac so running native with CrossOver is much faster.
You could try the Intel CrossOver on top of the Rosseta layer and see what you get. M2 with Intel Emulation with Windows Adaption layer . Should be possible but no idea about the performance.
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@MaxWaldorf
On my Intel Mac with CrossOver I have a Windows 10 Bottle and DXVK Backend for D3D11 enabled and get 100+ FPS on a MacBook Pro from 2019 -
@ohommes - I thought Bootcamp disappeared entirely with the new M Series chips? I know Crossover bundles an ARM Windows within, so it’s pretty self contained, like how I always boot into Win 10 with my Intel Mini.
Yeah…no idea which/what works best here…
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@Stevie
Here is a quick snap from a MacBook Pro 2019 Intel showing FPS 115
It is buttery smooth. -
@ohommes - looks familiar…I also run BMS on a 2018 15" Macbook Pro with a 6 core Intel i9. I always direct boot into Win 10 to run BMS.
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I can confirm that it runs fine on an M2 MacBook Air through Parallels. It’s not the way I usually play it though.
It would be interesting to try it with Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit at some point. Should give better performance if it works. But then you still have to get WDP, OpenTrack and VoiceAttack to all work together so perhaps mot worth it after all.
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@LugubriousHaddock - I should think the harder part of this would be maintaining the pointers/authorization of Falcon 4.0 that is required to get BMS to launch…in fact, how does one do that in any such install on an M2 onr any non-Intel machine - including when using Crossover?
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@Stevie Yes, I don’t really know how it works. But it does work in Crossover on Intel and would it be any different on M2? You have Falcon 4 installed in the bottle via steam and I assume it runs through a Rosetta translation layer. To be honest I have a very limited understanding on how any of this works, I just tend to poke at stuff randomly until it (sometimes) does :). Normally I run BMS by booting into Windows natively on an Intel Mac Pro.
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@LugubriousHaddock - I know BMS looks for the install of Falcon 4.0, but I have no idea how it would do that through an “interpreted” set of installs…but I believe you that it must work - somehow!
I do the same - boot into Win 10 on an Intel Mac. So given that you can’t even install Win 10 on an M2, I’m stumped…can you “install” Win apps on an M2, or just have the .exe files resident on disk, and that’s enough?
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So; out of curiosity, I attempted to install BMS 4.37 on Crossover 23.7 today.
I did the following:- New Windows 10 (64-bit) bottle
- Installed .NET 4.8
- Installed Falcon 4.0 from CD (didn’t run it)
- Installed BMS 4.37 (including DirectX; I actually did this later on, but I believe the best moment is installing it together with BMS)
- Activated DXVK and Msync
And… it works, super-smooth! It does crash from time to time at the beginning of the mission if the viewpoint is changed too quickly, maybe because it’s still loading something. Granted, I haven’t tried much, and especially I haven’t plugged any HOTAS yet (I’m on the road with a laptop).
By the way, I’m running it on a M2 Pro, but I’d expect any Apple Silicon to be able to run BMS quite smoothly.
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@danidr there were some similar reports of crashing loading models or textures, on Linux/Wine … you can find the threads here, I forget but I think they found a workaround (a specific version of Wine or some particular config)…
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Yep Wine 8.16 is last safe, In wine 8.17 they’ve changed memory management (apps gets memory addresses above 2GB on 64bit systems) which screws up some apps. See bug reports:
https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=55903
https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=55833