The recent re-release of Final Fantasy VII on PC and Steam at last made the game easily accessible on modern computers. No need for MIDI drivers or the Truemotion codec, since they were replaced with Ogg-vorbis music and On2 VP8 video files. As an added bonus, the game can sync the save files "to the cloud", and has a way of "boosting" the character stats in those save files to make the game easier if necessary.
But then, the game is made only for Windows, and I only have a Mac. Sure, I can use Bootcamp or a virtual machine, but I'd rather play it on the Mac itself than install and maintain a Windows machine. And not everybody has spare Windows licenses anyway.
So I attempted to use Wine, the "not a Windows emulator". I don't know why each time I use Wine, I'm still pleasantly surprised at how well it works. Sure, the very early versions of Wine were quite unstable, but that was a decade ago. Nowadays, at least 90% of Windows software can run quite well in Wine, without too much effort or hacking, and it just keeps getting better each time I try it.
Now, the latest version of Wine can run Steam quite well. Inside of that Steam, installing and running Final Fantasy VII worked flawlessly.
Setting up Wine and Steam on Macs is quite easy:
sudo port install wine-devel winetricks.winecfg, and close the window.winetricks steam.env WINEPREFIX="$HOME/.local/share/wineprefixes/steam" wine C:\\windows\\command\\start.exe /Unix ~/.local/share/wineprefixes/steam/dosdevices/c:/users/Public/Start\ Menu/Programs/Steam/Steam.lnkAnd that's it. When installing the game I checked the option to install a shortcut in the Start menu, and I've made a small tool called run_desktop.pl to launch the game directly from the Mac. For example, I would start it with perl run_desktop.pl ~/.local/share/applications/wine/Programs/Steam/FINAL\ FANTASY\ VII.desktop.
Published on July 12, 2014 at 13:50 EDT
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