Recent developments in virtualization, emulation and techniques that allow running of applications developed for “foreign” platforms as if they were native ones, have made it relatively easy, and often free, to use the same app in mixed environments.

This post takes a closer look on one of this techniques, namely Wine (acronym for “Wine Is Not an Emulator”), that allows running native Windows software on POSIX-compliant operating systems, such as Linux, macOS, & BSD, without need for a Windows license.

UPDATE: it has been revised to work between macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) and macOS 10.14 (Mojave). If you are also have the gog.com version read this other tutorial instead GOG Deus Ex Wineskin Tutorial. SAD NOTE: Due to apple dropping support for 32 Bit with the release of macOS 10.15 (Catalina) onwards it will no longer work! Okay first things first - the actual reason for me writing this 'How. I have a MacBook with a 2.3ghz i9, 5500m 4gb, 16gigs of ram, and a one tb ssd. I usually play with an external monitor. Before, in call of duty modern warfare, my frames would immediately dip to around 50 fps, while in war zone, it would dip all the way to 30 fps. Wineskin Winery is a tool for Wineskin. It is the only downloadable part of Wineskin needed. Manage and download Engines, or even custom build engines from Wine source code.

Here we install the game on macOS Sierra / High Sierra (the screenshots are from Sierra).

1. First you need to allow your system to install apps from “App Store and identified developers” (or possibly “Anyone”, depending on what else needs to be installed other than XQuartz and Wine). Earlier macOS versions let you alter the default setting (that allows apps only from the App Store) by setting the Gatekeeper option under System Preferences > Security & Privacy > General, but High Sierra hides the other two options and you need to enable them by opening the Terminal (in Finder, click Go > Utilities and open Terminal), and type the following (you need to enter your user password to be able to change the setting):

2. After this you can go and change the Gatekeeper setting.
3. Go to https://www.winehq.org and read the introductory text, if you are not familiar with the concept of Wine, then go to https://wiki.winehq.org/MacOS to read installation instructions specific to macOS.
4. You first need to have XQuartz 2.7.7. (or later) installed. Visit https://www.xquartz.org to download it. Click the .pkg file in Downloads to mount the installer, then launch it to go through the installation.
5. After having installed XQuartz, download Wine at https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/macosx/download.html (version 2.21 “Wine Staging” is a good choice):
6. Download the .pkg file, click it in Downloads to mount the installer, then launch it to start the installation. During the installation, you may be interrupted by prompts to install support for Mono (for .NET applications) and Gecko (for apps that use HTML internally). Accept to install these support packages.
   
   
7. After the installation is complete, you can go to http://www.4windsmj.com/downloads01.htm and download the latest version of Four Winds Mah Jong. Once downloaded, click the executable setup package (normally 4W2Full24.exe) in Downloads. It will automatically be launched in Wine and installed in correct location. A Windows shortcut is placed on the desktop, but it naturally does not work. You need to replace it with a Mac alias.
8. Open your Home folder (in Finder, click Go > Home or press Cmd+Shift+H). Now make hidden files and folders visible by pressing Cmd+Shift+. (dot). This shows the hidden .wine folder where your Windows environment is installed:
9. Double click the .wine folder and open folders until you have 4Winds2 folder open (the folder path relative to .wine is, as shown in the image below: drive_c > Program Files > 4Winds2:
10. Here, click with the secondary mouse button on 4Winds2.exe to create an alias, then drag and drop it on your desktop.
11. Launch Four Winds by double clicking the alias.
12. Once launched, go to File > Preferences, and under User Interface > General option page (accessed by the category tree on the left), disable color management by clearing the check mark from the Use color management option:

    You may also need to Bypass DirectX sound (under the same option page), and choose a MIDI file (on the Themes option page) for the “Background” and “Win of the game” music, or set their values to “none”. (the default music comes as .mp3 files which require DirectX). If you do not change the sound settings, you can turn off background music from the Options menu so that an unsupported feature is not used.

13. If you have a one-button mouse, click the Game Controls button, then change the mouse control setting for discarding from “Right click on raised tile” to “Click on raised tile”. On the same dialog box, you may need to uncheck Use custom cursors (with recent Wine builds, animated and custom cursors seem to be working fine, but if the game suddenly freezes, one possible cause is the use of custom mouse cursors).
14. Close the Preferences dialog box and click Help > Register to enter your registration name and number. Then choose Game > New Game to start a new game with preferred rules.
15. You may want to test with different game boards by using the options under the View > Game boards sub menu to find the board size and layout that works best on your screen. Note that the quality of graphics is mediocre compared to the original but looks slightly better on boards that have not been scaled. If you choose a 24-bit theme, scaling has a better quality: e.g., for the default graphics, choose File > Preferences, then under User Interface > Themes, choose “Four Winds (24-bit)”.

And there you are, running Four Winds Mah Jong on your Mac, without needing a Windows license. The quality is not as good as when using VMWare or VirtualBox (both free), or Parallels Desktop, not to mention running the game on real Windows on a BootCamp partition, but at least you can now play proper Mahjong with multitude of rule options offline on your Mac.

A screenshot of Four Winds 2.18 running on macOS Mojave using the latest Wine (4.2 Staging) and XQuartz 2.7.11.
The quality of graphics has improved with latest versions and scaled boards work well.

Running Four Winds on Linux

The procedure is basically the same as on macOS, though installation happens from within the Terminal. WineHQ has instructions for installing Wine on several different Linux systems. Below is a screenshot of Four Winds running on Ubuntu 16.04 using Wine 3.0.

UPDATE: it has been revised to work between macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) and macOS 10.14 (Mojave). If you are also have the gog.com version read this other tutorial instead GOG Deus Ex Wineskin Tutorial

SAD NOTE: Due to apple dropping support for 32 Bit with the release of macOS 10.15 (Catalina) onwards it will no longer work!

Okay first things first - the actual reason for me writing this 'How to' was to find a native way of playing Deus Ex 1 (2000 version) on Mac OS X rather than via something like bootcamp and a windows installation. The only version ever released for the Apple Mac was natively Mac OS 9 which as we all know is now long gone. Plus this is the important bit it's still the number one game for me of all time!

So for this tutorial I am going to show the basic steps of installing Deus Ex and an example of a module called 'New Vision' which adds higher detailed textures, but I suppose any other modules would work the same way with the same procedure.

So here is what I used for this...

1. For this 'How to' I am using Deus Ex (Game of the Year / GOTY) - Sold Out Software CD, which should cost only a few quid.
2. Wineskin 2.6.2 which can be downloaded for free here.
3. For this example 'New Vision 1.5' used to add better enhanced textures here.
4. The Kenzie Deus Exe Launcher from here. Make sure to download the older version DeusExe-v5.3.zip.

Step 1:

Install Deus Ex with Wineskin

So lets get started by launching 'Wineskin Winery' and make sure to choose 'WS9WineCX15.3.1' engine (This is also VERY important if you want it to work) then press 'Create New Blank Wrapper'.

If 'WS9WineCX15.3.1' doesn't appear on your list press the '+' and 'Download and Install'.

After pressing 'Create New Blank Wrapper,' name the file 'Deus Ex'.

Then just leave it to install the relevant files until the window appears telling you 'View wrapper in Finder'.

This will take you to the newly created file. Press on the icon + ctrl key to show the dropdown and then select 'Show Package Contents'. At the same time you can quit the 'Wineskin Winery' app since you won't need this anymore.

In the new window launch 'Wineskin'. NOTE: The alias for drive_c is in the same folder as the Wineskin app which is the easier way of doing some of the amends during this 'How to'.

Select the 'Advanced' option.

Now select 'Options' next to 'Tools' on the right. This will take you to another window and choose 'Modify Mappings'.

This again will take you to another window simply delete any text in the My Documents field and then press 'Save'.

Now back on the previous window select the 'Set Screen Options'.

By default the 'Automatic' should be checked but if not select it. Then move the 'Extra Gamma Correction' bar to the 'Very Bright' - your screen will go lighter for a few seconds but then go back to normal. Now make sure to uncheck the 'Auto Detect GPU Info for Direct3D' because it stopped it working in MAC OS 10.13. Once finished press the 'Done' button.

This is another part of the fix to make it work in MAC OS 10.13. Choose the 'Tools' tab then the 'Wineskin' button.

Then on the screen search for 'vid' and from the results expand 'settings' and checkbox 'videomemorysize=2048' and press run. This will run the winertrick - once done just press 'close'.

Now press the 'Install Software' button.

On the next screen press 'Choose Setup Executable'.

Insert the 'Deus Ex GOTY' CD and choose the 'Setup.exe' file.

All the next few windows should be straight forward so choose your language which for me is 'English International' - Also make sure that is says Version 1112F. Then press the 'Next' button.

Choose the 'I Agree'.

Then 'Next' - for this Deus Ex Sold Out software CD version it puts the files in 'C:DeusEx' directory but for other versions it may use a different directory but that's not important it will still work.

Make sure all the checkboxes are selected then again choose 'Next' and...

... then 'Install' and now just sitback and wait for the files to be installed.

Once installed you will see this screen just click 'Finish'.

A new Wineskin window should appear showing the DeusEx.exe file which needs to boot up automatically just select 'OK'.

!!! IF USING THE CD INSTALLER: Don't try to start it yet or you will get either an error screen or the game just won't boot. !!!

Now unzip the downloaded DeusExe-v5.3.zip file and drag the 4 files below into the folder 'drive_c/DeusEx/System/' - NOTE: the 'deusex.exe' file will replace the older version but that's fine. You should also be able to eject the 'Deus Ex GOTY' installer CD with no issues when running the game.

Now before you install the 'New Vision' module you will need to run the Deus Ex game first so press 'Test Run' in 'Wineskin'.

Your screen will go brighter and the 'kentie.net Deus Exe Launcher' should appear. It may take a while when first launching so be patient. Select the 'Configure' button.

On the new window select the following options which may differ mainly on your monitor size but for this example I am using the following:

• Renderer: OpenGL Support (without this set the New Vision textures won't work/appear).
• Resolution - Common: Choose your screen resolution, so for my example it's 1440x900.
• Resolution – Fullscreen: Checked.
• Quality: 32 bit color.
• Field of view: 16:10 - this should have automatically changed so no need to select anything.

Wineskin Winery Mac High Sierra Leone

Now press 'OK' which takes you to the previous window and choose 'Play'. This will take you to Deus Ex game menu and so to be safe start a game and load the first level. Once done exit the game via the games built in menu. A popup will appear in 'Wineskin' - again ignore it and just press 'Cancel'.

Step 2:

Install the 'New Vision' Module

Back in the Wineskin app choose 'Install Software'.

Then 'Choose Setup Executable' again.

Now select the 'New_Vision_v1-5.exe' which you downloaded - Before installing I should warn you it will add another 3GB of harddrive space but these days is that such a big deal! Now press 'Next'.

Wineskin Winery Mac High Sierra 10.13

The screen which will give you a rundown of what you are installing so just press 'Next'.

Now by default the first 2 checkboxes should be selected, both 'New Vision Files' and 'OpenGL Renderer (The OpenGL Renderer is an update to work on more modern graphics cards)'. This is fine and you don't need to select any others so just press the 'Next' button.

NOTE: If you are wondering why we installed Kentie's launcher earlier rather than here, it's because this version won't run on Mac OS X.

The new window will show the directory as 'c:DeusEx' - again just press the 'Next' button.

It will install all the files which will take some time but once done you will see the finished screen. Just press 'Finish'.

Now in order for the 'New Vision' to work we need to edit a file. Open the following 'drive_c/users/Wineskin/My Documents/Deus Ex/System/DeusEx.ini' file. Search for and change the following.

Insert and extra line of code so it looks like this...

Step 3:

To change the Games Icon (Optional)

Lets make it look better and give it an icon. So again in 'Wineskin' select 'Configuration' and choose the icon browse button and load up a file which can be as big as 512px x 512px and in icns file format. There are plenty on the web.

So it now should appear like this...

Step 4:

Start the game with high-res textures

Now quit 'Wineskin' and run the Deus Ex game with the new icon. When the 'kentie.net Deus Exe Launcher' appears press 'Data Directories'.

NOTE: This only needs to be done once NOT everytime it starts.

On the next screen checkbox both 'New Vision Maps' and 'New Vision Textures'. Now press the 'OK' button. NOTE: If the game plays slow on your machine try unchecking these and then maybe try changing your screen size, plus if you install any other modules they will probably have to be activated here in order to work.

Download Wineskin Winery 2.6.0 For Mac

And finally you can press the 'Play' button and start a new game. You should now be able to see the high-res textures working. The levels will take longer to load due to the new high-res textures.

Here are a few game screenshots.

To conclude - I know this has been an epic of 'How to's' and someone else may know an easier/shorter way but I hope it helps someone! Maybe the actual company who made the game in the first place would give us a native version of 'Deus Ex 1' with new graphics and render engine (Yes I have played Deus Ex 3!)... it's good to dream!

Wineskin Winery Mac Os High Sierra

I have also tested it with the following mods and it works fine, but they are NOT used in this tutorial.

Wineskin Winery Engine

1. Zodiac MOD - Single player missions. Read how to install it hereNOTE: You will need to follow the instructions on this post first.
2. Redsun 2020 MOD - Single player missions. NOTE: Doesn't work with New Vision MOD.here
3. The Nameless MOD - Single player missions. here
4. Project HDTP MOD - High-res Characters (Slow moving MOD on the development front) plus not all the characters are included. here