Any way to run SH III on an M3 Mac?
 

For a variety of reasons I moved to a new Mac Air M3 laptop. I knew it would limit me with some games but my "main" AAA gaming is on my PS5 and XBox X; however I am playing some wargames on my Mac, from Steam - right now Carriers at War Guadalcanal Campaign and Locked and Loaded (a tactical squad level wargame, board game conversion.)

But I have a REAL hunger to play Silent Hunter III again. I loved that dynamic campaign, the cat and mouse feel of being a stealthy predator, etc.

Is there any way to play Silent Hunter III on an M3 Mac?

Thanks.

Be a wino
 

Wine is a free compatibility layer that tries to mimic the interfaces provided by all versions of Windows. It's really designed for Linux but I believe there's a macOS version. https://www.winehq.org/

It's a bit hard to get your head round it at first. There are a few forks from the project intended to make it easier to run (e.g. Proton for the Steamdeck), some of which you have to pay for. However on Linux it runs Silent Hunter 3 and all the mods I've tried. In fact i find installing SH3 on it is easier than Windows.


If you try it please post back here for the benefit of others.

Welcome back!
 

Thanks, I will dig into that. Now that I'm retired I have the time. ;)

No luck so far. Was able to use a wine app, Porting Kit, to run other games but SH3 just gives me a 3D error when I try to start it up. :(

Things to try
 

ooops! finger trouble

Things to try
 

Sounds hopeful.
Failed to initialize 3d is the error you get when your display cannot support the resolution and refresh rate asked for by the application. No idea what your mac supports, but I'd guess not 1024x768.

Vanilla SH3
Stock SH3 runs full screen at 1024x768 or 800x600.
It should be possible to persuade stock SH3 to run in a window. To do this without running the game edit [SH3 folder]/data/Cfg/Main.cfg and set FullScreen=No.

Widescreen
The various widescreen mods vary, but are typically 1920x1080 or sometimes 1366x768. Unfortunately they only run in fullscreen mode.
The widescreen mods make use of a thing called a directX wrapper. This is a hacked d3d9.dll file which sits in the same folder as sh3.exe. It intercepts all calls to directx9, modifies them and forwards them to the kosher d3d9.dll. To make this work under wine it is necessary to run winecfg, select the libraries tab and override d3d9 to d3d9 (native,builin). This is because windows automatically uses dll's in the same folder as the executable but wine insists that you tell it to do so first. While you are about it override msvcp71 and msvcr71 as well as some mods use these and they may not be in your system folder.
Lastly configure d3d9.dll by editing d3d9.ini (in the sh3.exe folder) and setting DisplayWidth and DisplayHeight to the required values and Refreshrate to false.