Problems with Final Fantasy XI Online - Japanese

[bpoint]

Hello all,

I've been trying (and thus far failing) to get the Japanese version of FFXI working under wine. I have been playing FFXI here in Japan since the release, so I have the original Japanese 4-disc CD set, plus the extra CDs/DVDs for each different expansion.

I originally started with wine-1.3.8, and for the most part, the CD installs and POL/FFXI updates worked fine -- I was actually quite impressed to see how much wine has improved. I did initially experience extremely slow rendering (multiple seconds/frame) with POL, but I found that if I suspended desktop effects (I'm using KDE 4.5.3), that fixed the POL rendering issue.

Presently I have two remaining problems:
1) I am unable to install the Altana - Wings of the Goddess expansion disk, even though Zilart, Promathia, and Aht Urhgan installed fine.

wine-1.2.1 gives the following dump after I try to run setup.exe from the install CD (wine-1.3.8 and 1.3.10 reported similar TypeLib errors, which is where I believe the root of the problem is):
fixme:advapi:LookupAccountNameW (null) L"bpoint" (nil) 0x3382c0 (nil) 0x3382c4 0x3382b8 - stub
fixme:advapi:LookupAccountNameW (null) L"bpoint" 0x19b020 0x3382c0 0x19b128 0x3382c4 0x3382b8 - stub
fixme:heap:HeapSetInformation 0x7fd651229000 0 0x7fd65629fcb0 4
fixme:atl:AtlModuleInit SEMI-STUB (0x40f900 0x40f010 0x400000)
err:ole:marshal_object couldn't get IPSFactory buffer for interface {101a9fa5-98cb-4ac3-b67c-3dc040c45996}
err:ole:ClientIdentity_QueryMultipleInterfaces IRemUnknown_RemQueryInterface failed with error 0x80004002
err:ole:StdMarshalImpl_ReleaseMarshalData could not map object ID to stub manager, oxid=1f00000020, oid=2
err:ole:CoReleaseMarshalData IMarshal::ReleaseMarshalData failed with error 0x8001011d
err:msi:remove_tracked_tempfiles failed to delete L"C:\\users\\bpoint\\Temp\\msid19.tmp"
fixme:ole:TLB_ReadTypeLib Header type magic 0x00905a4d not supported.
err:ole:TLB_ReadTypeLib Loading of typelib L"C:\\users\\bpoint\\Temp\\{8C51E357-D034-457C-955B-6D0882E0FA59}\\EncryptPatchVer.dll" failed with error 0
fixme:ole:TLB_ReadTypeLib Header type magic 0x00905a4d not supported.
err:ole:TLB_ReadTypeLib Loading of typelib L"C:\\users\\bpoint\\Temp\\{8C51E357-D034-457C-955B-6D0882E0FA59}\\Cleanup.dll" failed with error 0
fixme:ole:TLB_ReadTypeLib Header type magic 0x00905a4d not supported.
err:ole:TLB_ReadTypeLib Loading of typelib L"C:\\users\\bpoint\\Temp\\{8C51E357-D034-457C-955B-6D0882E0FA59}\\POLCoreCheck.dll" failed with error 0

InstallShield then pops up a dialog with "1628: スクリプトベースのインストールを完了できませんでした。", or translated: The script base install could not be completed. Clicking OK just aborts the install.

2) FFXI freezes with a black screen (but music continues to play) after the screenfade out when logging into the lobby server after selecting the login character -- the "Downloading Data" never shows in the bottom-right hand corner.

I did a bit of digging on this one already, and previous versions of wine seemed to have a problem with this -- most notably wine-1.1. There is a "sanity patch" which adds some checking into imm32, but recent wine versions seem to have this patch already in the source, so I don't know what the problem is. I've also tried various graphic tweaks using FFXI's configuration tool, but nothing helped. I should point out that the graphics and animations (and sound/music) are absolutely flawless inside the FFXI menu, and it runs at a very nice framerate.

So far, I've tried wine-1.2.1, 1.3.8, and 1.3.10, and all three exhibit the same two problems I described above. I'm guessing since FFXI seems to work for everyone else, the fact that I am using the Japanese version might be the issue. (Before you ask, no -- I don't own the English version, so I can't try it.)

System-wise, I'm running Gentoo on amd64, with nvidia-drivers-260.19.21 on a GeForce GT 240.

Any suggestions at this point would be very much appreciated. Thanks!

[BenR]

I'd suggest borrowing the English version. It works fine with the Japanese Playonline Viewer, have used it myself. Only issue I've seen is that I cannot figure out how to input Japanese within Wine.

[bpoint]

Resurrecting this old thread after more than a year in the hope that maybe someone will have some kind of idea or suggestion...

I'm now using wine-1.4-rc1, and still am unable to get past the FFXI character selection screen. I still cannot install the Altana expansion DVD yet either.

Unfortunately borrowing the English version to test is not possible for me, as I live in Japan. Buying it from overseas and having it shipped here is of course possible, but I'm not prepared to spend money just to simply test if something works or not. Sorry.

There seems to be at least one other person who has the same or similar problem, and posted a bug about it here: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28861

I've added my comments to that bug for now.

[periastron]

After hearing that Wine 1.4 was out, I checked the CodeWeavers site and saw that Crossover 11.0 (which is based on 1.4) was available. I've been doing a lot of FFXI testing on VMware and Parallels on my iMac recently, and wanted to see whether the latest Crossover could handle it. I'd tried with 10.x, but got nothing but white windows.

This time it went much better: The POL viewer launched, everything was visible, and it ran wonderfully smoothly. The (English) FFXI client started successfully and ran without incident through the title screen and character selection screen. However, as already noted here, after selecting a character, I ended up with a black screen while the music played in the background... and that was it.

It seems a shame to be stuck at this point, because everything up to then appeared to be running really well.

I'm running on a late 2009 21.5" iMac with ATI graphics, on a Windows XP bottle. Any ideas?

[jjmckenzie]

On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 12:56 AM, periastron <[email protected]> wrote:

After hearing that Wine 1.4 was out, I checked the CodeWeavers site and saw that Crossover 11.0

CrossOver problems have to be reported to CodeWeavers even if the
problem appears to be Wine code.

James