EVE won't launch on M1 MacBook Air [With Temporary Solution]

This is somewhat expected, I just wanted to give some feedback given what I’ve tried.

Out of the box the wine instance tries to run but then shuts off, the actual electron launcher seems okay. The wine loader shows a ‘Program Error’ however it’s a small line in the top left of my desktop, seems it can’t render the window properly - so this might be a big sur incompatibility thing rather than specifically the M1 chip.

image

I switched to dev branches and tried using 5.7 client, sadly the same result.

2 Likes

Emulation layer (Rosetta 2) to run a game using an emulation layer (WINE). Hopefully we can see if there’s a way forward for EVE Online Mac client as we see Apples hardware transition over the next 2-3 years. Blizzard actually dropped a new version of WOW today that will run native on M1 chips, so be interesting to see what CCP does in the near future.

2 Likes

I’m hoping that it will be an impetus to get a proper client for Mac users that uses metal, even if it still relies on x86 under Rosetta. I don’t know what measure of resource CCP put on maintaining the Mac build but I can’t imagine it’d be an astronomical amount of work given most of it seems to be written in python with maybe some C code for graphics. The fact the wine client exists has the engineer inside me suspecting they’re being held by the throat by some awful middleware that was made in a vacuum and only supports Windows, or a lot of the code can only work with DirectX and Win32 APIs. But whether or not they support Mac going into the future, I do think the non-x86 buzz is going to be disruptive and Microsoft will definitely follow suit which could spell uncertainty for Windows users too.

3 Likes

Hi folks

We are aware that the client is not working on M1. Investigations are happening internally into what options are available.

5 Likes

I heard news that code-weavers managed to get stuff running on Big Sur 11.1 on an M1 mac, I downloaded 11.1 myself and tried launching it with logging. You might have success launching the binary using an upstream commit of wine rather than 5.7 stable, it’s failing on launching DirectXRedist.exe and the client fails importing _trinity_stub_deploy likely because of the absence of dx pieces - given there’s screenshots of the folks over at CodeWeavers running Witcher 3 on an arm macbook I think perhaps hope is not lost. Hope it’s helpful

Do you mean Big Sur 11.0.1? 11.1 isn’t out yet.

11.1 is in public beta and has some Rosetta 2 improvements.

I got it working. The performance is absolutely astonishing…

I’m getting 50-60 frames per second with everything High at 2560x1600, the MacBook Air is running on battery and is barely warm. I took a video because I’m a little bit in disbelief. For comparisons sake, plugged into an external display at 3840x2160 I get 25-30FPS.

Using CrossOver 20, 64-bit EVE option on macOS 11.1 Public beta. :grin: This is really something I’m so excited.

Here’s the video, apologies in advance for the derpy voiceover. @CCP_Caffeine Hope this is encouraging news if you haven’t already got it working!

6 Likes

That’s great news, and thanks for letting us know :grinning: Performance does seem to be good, given that this is running through Wine and then Rosetta2. Apple have done a great job!

Conversations internally about how we continue to support Mac long term are still happening :blush:

If you’re able to provide any details to the community on changes you needed to make to get it working, that would be appreciated. Or Is it a case of it just working?

2 Likes

At the moment it seems you need the public beta of macOS 11.1 and the latest build of CrossOver 20, then you need the EVE Online 64-bit bottle. So not a solution for everyone just yet. But once I had that it just worked for me then, you have to be patient on the first run because I think there’s a lot going on underneath with wine & rosetta but after that it does just work.

2 Likes

Hi! Can you let me know how to make it run on M1 MacBook Pro? I need to get this wine emulator?

At the moment the best thing to do is wait. Currently it requires running a beta version of macOS (11.1) and CrossOver 20 for mac, I was unable to get it working using only Wine even with the beta version of macOS. It’s not a good idea to run a beta version of macOS if you need to rely on your laptop for anything and I don’t feel good endorsing the use of CrossOver either.

Okay, thank you. I hope this gets sorted soon.

I currently use have a 2014 Mac Mini that I use as my home computer and I run eve on it. I saw the new M1 Mac Mini as well as your video and am thinking about getting the M1 Mac Mini to run eve as its cheaper than the laptop and I don’t need to be portable. Would you suggest waiting a little to see if CCP is able to get a more streamlined experience on the M1 chip or going for it now? I don’t really use my Mac Mini for work, its generally just for entertainment.

I’d personally suggest if you’re not using it for work and you appreciate what beta software entails then it sounds like a good idea to me.

I can’t speak for CCP and it’s probably not helpful for me to estimate a timeline but I’d guess that it’ll run without fiddling at least before they release the next Mac Mini. I’m certain it’ll be a huge leap forward compared to what you have currently even with Rosetta, and my overall impression outside of EVE is positive too, just maybe keep your expectations humble in the short term if you do go for it as things could change software-wise that breaks things and it might be just chance that EVE works for me with the aforementioned setup. Also bear in mind my approach requires CrossOver specifically which isn’t free unlike the Wine project it’s built upon.

If you do buy directly from Apple I think they have a no-questions asked return policy, FWIW.

@Petal_Everbloom

I saw the video, how well does it hold up outside the station, durning warp etc. I know my 2018 Mac mini with 580 egpu 32gig ram at max did some amazing things, but station/warp/flying/combat all have their own rates on the FPS.

Sorry for the delay, just sat down and took some screenshots doing various things. Settings are 2560x1600 in Fullscreen (interval one) with everything High but with Anti-Aliasing off.

~40FPS looking at the sun
~50FPS in warp
~35FPS at a gate (jumping)
~40FPS mooching around Dodixie
~50FPS spinning ships in station

For what it’s worth, when I was just grinding missions in bed with this thing on my lap I run at 1680x1050 Fixed Window with the same settings (so I can cmd+tab instantly for safari) and with those settings the only time it dipped below 60fps was when I was panning around in a mission with one of those massive gas clouds which tanked my frame-rate to like 35.

Laptop power metrics have GPU power at about 5800mW, DRAM power at 1120mW and CPU cluster power at 3900mW. You get slightly more consistent framerates with the Pro given it has enough thermal headroom to run the GPU and CPUs at full tilt indefinitely whereas on the Air, the frame-rate can dip momentarily a few frames when doing things like jumping and docking where there’s sudden CPU load. If you play at 1680x1050 though this is basically a non-issue as it doesn’t stress the chip enough and pulls about 7-8W total.

1 Like

Did you get 16GB or 8GB of RAM?

@Spitfire1938 I went for 8GB, seems fine so far but I don’t use it as my main machine.

Thank you for the details. I’m waiting on Fedex to bring my 13" M1 MBP (I went 16gig ram). Though I don’t play EVE actively right now, I do enjoy keeping up on the what’s happening stuff. Plus, this is good news for all the Mac players, as they will be able to keep playing EVE on the new hardware and on Big Sur (11.1+) until Apple does something crazy again.

Edit: its still impressive to me, what this M1 chip is able to do with so little power.

1 Like