Running Windower with FFXI (through Wine)

Hello it's me (Adelle song cues)

So I am coming back to FFXI after like a 7 year hiatus. I was wondering if it's possible to run Windower with plugins for Wine enabled FFXI on a Mac.

Have searched and have not found anything posted recently.

Probably not.

I can't say it definitly won't work, but last I checked Mono (which Wine uses as its .Net implementation) doesn't support WPF, which we use for the UI in the Windower 4 launcher. You might be able to get around this limitation by installing Microsoft's implementation instead of using Mono, but even if that works, PlayOnline will probably crash instantly, that is, unless the state of Wine's implemplementation of the Windows debugging APIs has improved dramatically. The library used by Windower 4 and earlier to hook Win32 and internal game functions makes heavy use of these APIs, and Wine has hitorically done a poor job implementing these rarely used parts of the Windows API.

Now, that's not to say that Windower will never work on Wine. I have written a new hooking library from scratch to replace the one we use currently for the next version of Windower. I did this for reasons completely unrelated to Wine compatability, but it will likely address most, if not all, of the issues with getting hook to work under Wine. If hook works, then it's mostly trivial to write a Wine compatible launcher, by just stripping off the GUI, and either just providing a command line only version for linux or creating a new GUI in WinForms or GTKSharp or somthing of that nature.

Getting Windower 5 up and running on Windows is my top priority right now though, so I can't make any kind of promises until that's done.

Just wanted to add my 2 cents of encouragement. FFXI windower + addons/plugins is one of the last things that keeps me tied to Windows. Would be awesome if that worked on Linux with Wine.

Probably not.

 

I can't say it definitly won't work, but last I checked Mono (which Wine uses as its .Net implementation) doesn't support WPF, which we use for the UI in the Windower 4 launcher. You might be able to get around this limitation by installing Microsoft's implementation instead of using Mono, but even if that works, PlayOnline will probably crash instantly, that is, unless the state of Wine's implemplementation of the Windows debugging APIs has improved dramatically. The library used by Windower 4 and earlier to hook Win32 and internal game functions makes heavy use of these APIs, and Wine has hitorically done a poor job implementing these rarely used parts of the Windows API.

 

Now, that's not to say that Windower will never work on Wine. I have written a new hooking library from scratch to replace the one we use currently for the next version of Windower. I did this for reasons completely unrelated to Wine compatability, but it will likely address most, if not all, of the issues with getting hook to work under Wine. If hook works, then it's mostly trivial to write a Wine compatible launcher, by just stripping off the GUI, and either just providing a command line only version for linux or creating a new GUI in WinForms or GTKSharp or somthing of that nature.

 

Getting Windower 5 up and running on Windows is my top priority right now though, so I can't make any kind of promises until that's done.

There are a lot of linux users, if you could make that possible it would be awesome for everyone .

Thank you very much for doing the Windower btw

If I could help with anything let me know.

For what it's worth, wine-staging(maybe even normal wine? I didn't try) can boot windowers WPF GUI now, but as expected, there are windows functions that hook.dll probably needs to function that are stubbed which eventually results in a null pointer access in pol.exe.