Wineskin Advanced Mac

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It was a while back that I attempted to run MetaTrader on Mac. A couple of years past and some new options available warrant a new post. This time I’m using a porting tool called Wineskin. It is based on Wine, same as Codeweavers Crossover we tried last time. Let’s get straight to pros and cons.

Unofficial Wineskin and all of its components are 64Bit bar WSGamma due to the lack of source. Wineskin Engines are Wine, meaning if Wine doesn’t work on on macOS Catalina, only CrossOver19 when launched will function on macOS Catalina and I don’t plan on building that on day one. Open Wineskin Winery, select the latest engine and the latest wrapper, then click 'Create New Blank Wrapper'  Input a name for your warframe app, like 'Warframe', then click 'Ok' (this name will be referred to as APPNAME later on). Manage and download Engines, or even custom build engines from Wine source code. Get Master Wrapper updates Create Wineskin wrappers Wineskin is a. Once complete, click the “Done” button to close the window, then “Done” on the “Wineskin Advanced” window, and then “Quit” on the Wineskin app Install Unofficial Patch 1.042c The Unofficial Patch 1.042c is the same as the official patch but fixes some additional bugs and removes the requirement of having the CD in the drive to.

Pros and Cons.

Pros:

  • Both Wine and Wineskin are open-source projects and running MetaTrader with them won’t cost you a dime. You don’t even need a Windows licence. It’s all free.
  • It creates a wrapper around our Windows application, which looks like a native OSX application bundle and switching between windows (say, trading terminal and MetaEditor) is no different than any other OSX application. That also means you can transfer or share your bundle if you want to.
  • Since it is based on Wine, which use isn’t limited to OSX, we can leverage all the experience and know-how of Linux crowd. In fact, I referred to quite a few Linux-based how-to’s while exploring the subject.
  • There’s quite a community around these projects and they are constantly improving.

Cons:

  • Apparently you may run into some stability issues here and there, but that pretty much depends on the quality of the wrapper you create using these tools.

Install Wineskin Winery and create a wrapper

As mentioned above you can share the final application bundle, although sometimes it may be too hefty. My MetaTrader bundle got to almost 300Mb, for instance, but it can easily go into gigabytes if you download some history data for EA tester. Therefore, we are going to have a look at creating our own bundle here.

First thing you need to install Wineskin. Head down to the Download page on Wineskin website and get Wineskin Winery. Just run it and generate a new wrapper. It should be pretty straightforward even without reading a Wineskin’s manual. When prompted give it a name, ‘MetaTrader4’ will do.

Set up your wrapper

Now that you’ve got your wrapper you’re going to do some setup within it as if you would be setting up a Windows virtual machine instance. Wineskin Winery does put wrappers into “unusual” location, but it offers you to open them in Finder after they are complete, or just look up your new wrapper by the name you gave it using OSX’s Spotlight. Right-click the wrapper file and select “Show Package Contents”. Inside the package you’ll see ‘Wineskin’ app and the ‘drive_c’ folder with typical Windows folder structure. That’s what you’re going to work with now.

First, launch Wineskin app (the one inside your package). Click “Advanced” button and then select “Tools” tab. There’s lots of useful stuff here if you are a technical mastermind. But if you are not, just hit “Winetricks” button in “Utilities” column.

Basically, Winetricks lets you install Windows framework components your application needs without copying files manually.

  1. Type ‘vcrun6’ into the search field. You’ll see a bunch of packages satisfying your search string. Look up the latest service pack available (it was ‘vcrun6sp6’ at the time of writing), click the checkbox, hit “Run”. It will install the base packages it needs.
  2. Do the same for ‘ie6’. This is necessary for the built-in MQL reference in MetaEditor to work.
  3. You could also use Winetricks to install fonts. There’s an “allfonts” option, which might be an overkill, and “corefonts” option, but I’m not sure if it includes Windings font used by MetaTrader. So instead of installing via Winetricks you may manually copy your own set of default fonts into ‘drive_c/windows/Fonts’ folder inside your wrapper.

Install MetaTrader 4

Close Winetricks. Back to main Wineskin screen, hit “Install Windows Software”, select the MetaTrader installer you’ve downloaded and follow its prompts. At the end Wineskin prompts you for the main EXE file, but you can always change that on the ‘WineskinAdvancedConfiguration’ page. The file launching MT4 is called ‘terminal.exe’.

Wineskin Advanced Mac

If you want to set the icon for MetaTrader you can do it on the same ‘WineskinAdvancedConfiguration’ page. Create your own ‘.icns’ file using OSX’s Icon Composer or feel free to use mine.

When you’re done you may want to copy ‘config’ folder from your existing Windows installation of MetaTrader4. That will transfer your previous server connection lists as well as your MetaTrader account details and layouts. Just make sure you are not trying to connect to one broker’s servers while using an installer from another.

Testing it

Now you can exit Wineskin app and close the Finder window showing your bundle contents. To run MT4 you launch the ‘MetaTrader4’ application bundle generated by Wineskin Winery at the very beginning.

On a cursory look it is an improvement over Crossover version 8 I used back then. Everything seems to be smooth – the interface (drag&drop, fonts, icons and other stuff), charts, indicators, expert advisors (didn’t test DLL import, but can’t see a reason for it not to work) and strategy tester (including visualisation), opening a trade from the market (didn’t test other orders, but again should be alright), MQL editor.

Two things didn’t work for me:

  • Intellisense/keywords completion in MetaEditor. It opens the popup window, but fails to load the data. What’s promising it doesn’t cause the application to freeze or crash, plus the whole intellisense business worked beautifully for me in MetaTrader 5 under Wineskin, so possibly someone will have another go at it. Even function signature popup works fine as you can see in the screenshot above, but the keyword completion doesn’t for some reason. By the way, to remove the standard OSX window header from the intellisense popup, tick the “Force use of wrappers quartz-wm…” checkbox on ‘WineskinAdvancedOptions’ page.
  • F1 help. Pressing F1 causes the application to crash, even though it opens fine from the main menu. But who needs it anyway.

If something goes wrong

If you experience any kind of runtime issues and you are adventurous enough to dive deeper into setup and troubleshooting business, Debug Mode is of great help. Instead of launching the bundle go to package contents, then open ‘WineskinAdvancedConfiguration’ page and hit “Test Run (Debug Mode)”, replicate the issue and close the program. After that Wineskin will let you check the runtime logs, where you may find a clue to a missing or misbehaving component.

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For reference, I used FXCM’s MetaTrader 4 Build 418 with Wineskin Wrapper version 2.5.4 and Engine version WS8Wine1.5.0, OSX 10.6.8 Snow Leopard.

Game Details:

Welcome to the “Banished” for Mac game page. This page contains information + tools how to port Banished in a few very simple steps (which even a noob can understand) so you can play it on your Mac just like a normal application using Crossover. So if you haven’t Crossover yet, then sign up here and buy the program or if you want to test it first, for the 14 days trial. Or use the Porting Kit alternative.

I recommend the GOG.com version which works out of the box (DRM free). Click on the links mentioned here, create an account using the signup in the top bar on the GOG.com website and buy the game. You automatically get when creating an account 14 free GOG games added to your account so you have nothing to loose, only to receive!

Wineskin Advanced Mac

Wineskin Winery Mac

Use this CrossTie… to install the GOG game into Crossover
Make sure Crossover is installed before downloading/running the CrossTie. Or use Porting Kit.

Important 27″ iMac workaround:
When having a 27″ iMac the game will crash on launch because it takes over the desktop resolution (which is high!) and then runs out of video memory. The workaround is to go to the regedit (rightclick wrapper –> show package content –> wineskin–> advanced –> tools –> regedit –> navigate to the hkey_curent_user/software/shining Rock Software LLC/Banished) and change the strings “VideoWidth” to “800” and “VideoHeight” to “600”. Then the game will launch and you will able to change resololution to the second highest resolution and play fine. However, everytime you close the game FIRST change back the resolution to 800×600 or 1024×768 or the game won’t launch again. Its a nasty workaround for 27″ iMacs but for now the only solution.

Game Description:
Banished is a city building game where you control a group of exiled people who are restarting their lives in the wilderness. They have only the clothes on their backs and a cart filled with supplies from their homeland. The townspeople work, build, get older, have children, and eventually die. Keeping them healthy, happy, and fed are essential to making a successful town grow. Any structure can be built at any time, provided that your people have collected the resources to do so.

Additional Port Information:
Graphical Cards Tested: NVIDIA 9400M graphics card, AMD Radeon 6770M
OSX 10.7.5 and 10.8.2+ compatible?: yes
Whats tested: Playing a while
Does Multiplayer work?: not available
Known Issues: None
Whats not tested: Intel graphical cards

Wineskin Advanced Mac Torrent


Instruction video