Having studied astrology with Rod Suskin for 3 years, it has always annoyed me that I wasn’t able to run Solar Fire on my Mac.  When Codeweavers announced yesterday that their Lame Duck Challenge had been answered and that Crossover Office was available for free download, I decided once and for all to resolve this one last niggle.

I ran Crossover and fired up the Solar Fire installer.  It created a new Bottle and set up the Solar Fire icons.

Of course the first thing that I did was fire up Solar Fire, and the first thing that happened was that the splash screen appeared and promptly dissapeared again.  No error, no message, nothing.  In an effort to generate some kind of error I tried some of the other apps that come with Solar Fire.  Luckily the Almuten Editor gave me an error that I could use

threed32.ocx is living in the right place in the Bottle’s Windows/system32 folder, and adding a native override for it in the Wine Configuration didn’t help.  Rather than ass about in Windows DLL hell I fired up the Almuten Editor via the wine command line, forcing it to log everything that it was doing – score:

trace:file:wine_nt_to_unix_file_name L"\\??\\C:\\windows\\system32\\threed32.ocx" -> "/Users/allank/Library/Application Support/CrossOver/Bottles/winxp/dosdevices/c:/windows/system32/threed32.ocx"
trace:file:RtlDosPathNameToNtPathName_U (L"C:\\windows\\system32\\MFC40.DLL",0x33ed68,0x0,0x0)
trace:file:RtlGetFullPathName_U (L"C:\\windows\\system32\\MFC40.DLL" 520 0x33ead8 0x0)
warn:file:wine_nt_to_unix_file_name L"MFC40.DLL" not found in /Users/allank/Library/Application Support/CrossOver/Bottles/winxp/dosdevices/c:/windows/system32

MFC40.DLL seems to be the culprit.  Quick download and copying the file to ~/Library/Application Support/CrossOver/Bottles/winxp/dosdevices/c:/windows/system32 and give it another shot.

There are still a few strange font display problems, but at least it runs.