Empire Earth on macOS

Play your own GOG copy of Empire Earth Gold Edition (the base game and The Art of Conquest) on an Apple Silicon Mac, full screen, using only free tools: Wine, DXVK and MoltenVK. No CrossOver or Parallels needed.

This repository is a launcher and a set of compatibility patches. It contains no game files; you supply the game.

What you get

• Both games in single player: random maps, campaigns, scenarios, saved games and the Scenario Editor, with sound and music.
• Full screen at the Mac's own resolution, and Cmd+Tab in and out. On a MacBook with a notch, every screen sits below it.
• Smooth big battles: about 130 FPS on an M2 Pro in a late-game battle with over a thousand units moving. Much of the game's maths now runs on modern CPU instructions, with results identical to the original.
• Mac keyboard mappings for the keys a Mac lacks (see Keys).
• Bigger armies: a unit limit of up to 10000, drag-select takes every unit in the box, and every unit of a big crowd is drawn.

Multiplayer is not a goal of this project.

Requirements

• An Apple Silicon Mac with macOS 14 or later
• Empire Earth Gold Edition from GOG: the Windows offline installer (setup_empire_earth_*.exe) or an already installed game folder
• Homebrew, used to install the free winetricks and mingw-w64
• Rosetta 2 (installed automatically if missing)

Retail CD copies are not supported (their copy protection does not run).

Install

chmod +x scripts/*.sh
./scripts/install-wine.sh
./scripts/setup-prefix.sh
./scripts/set-game.sh "/path/to/setup_empire_earth_gold.exe"

install-wine.sh downloads a free Wine build (about 185 MB) and setup-prefix.sh prepares its Windows environment. set-game.sh accepts the GOG installer or a folder containing Empire Earth.exe.

To get the installer: GOG Galaxy for Mac won't install this Windows game, so open your GOG account in a browser, find Empire Earth Gold Edition and download the Windows offline backup installer.

Play

./scripts/launch.sh        # Empire Earth
./scripts/launch.sh aoc    # The Art of Conquest

Or build the Mac app and use its Play button:

./scripts/build-app.sh
open "dist/Empire Earth.app"

Keys on a Mac

On the Mac	In the game
delete	Del: kill the selected unit (Shift+delete kills all selected)
= and -	keypad + and −: game speed up and down
fn+F1…F12	the F-keys: F3 pause, F4 quick save, F10 options, F11 clock and FPS
fn+↑	Page Up: previous messages
Option	Alt
Control+Option+Q	release the mouse and minimize the game
Control+Option+X	quit the game
Cmd+Tab	switch apps (the game pauses while it is in the background)

To use the F-keys without fn, turn on Use F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys in System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Function Keys. macOS uses F11 for Show Desktop and, if you have turned them on, Control+number to switch desktops; turn those shortcuts off in the Mission Control section of the same window if you want them in the game (F11, and Control+number to create groups).

Bigger armies

The Game Unit Limit on the game setup screen now goes up to 10000 (the original stops at 1200). The limit is shared by all players, and very large armies make the game slower.

A drag-select now takes every unit in the box (the original stops at 63). This works in single player; for a LAN game, turn it off (below) on every machine.

Every unit on screen is drawn. The original draws at most 512 units at a time, so in a big crowd the nearest ones blinked in and out.

Options

Options are environment variables for the launcher, for example:

EE_BIG_ARMIES=0 ./scripts/launch.sh

Variable	Effect
EE_BIG_ARMIES=0	the original unit limit (1200) and selection size (63)
EE_BIG_CROWDS=0	draw at most 512 units on screen, as the original does
EE_MAC_KEYS=0	the original key bindings only
EE_ANIMATION_SMOOTHING=0	turn Animation Smoothing off (a few more FPS; units move less smoothly)
EE_X87T=0, EE_SSE_MATH=0	run the game's original maths (slower)

If something goes wrong

• A start that hangs before the menu is retried automatically.
• ./scripts/stop.sh stops the game and everything Wine started.
• Logs are in ~/Library/Application Support/EmpireEarthMac/logs, and in ee-ddraw.log and ee-version.log in the game folder.

How it works

Empire Earth is a 32-bit Direct3D 7 game. It runs under Rosetta 2 in Wine, and its graphics go through a chain of translation layers:

Empire Earth.exe → ddraw.dll (this project's proxy) → D7VK (Direct3D 7 → 9)
                 → DXVK (Direct3D 9 → Vulkan) → MoltenVK (Vulkan → Metal)

Two small DLLs from this project run inside the game (patches/win32): a DirectDraw proxy that keeps full screen, focus and page flips working, and a version.dll proxy that carries the fixes, the speed-ups and the extras above. A shim around MoltenVK (patches/vulkan) handles the Mac window and full screen. Each change to the game's code is applied in memory at start-up, and only after checking that the game's bytes are exactly what it expects.