EVE Mentat ALMOST in Mac OS X (And Probably Linux)

IMPORTANT: CLICK THIS LINK TO READ PART 2, IN WHICH I FIX EVE MENTAT'S CACHE SCRAPING FEATURE 

I am now beginning to kick myself over how simple this was. I have been trying for quite a while to run EVE Mentat in OS X so I wouldn't have to switch to my windows partition just to station trade. After much trial and error, I've nearly figured it out.

This was done on OS X Mavericks 10.9.4 with Wine 1.6.2 and EVE Mentat 1.2.26.1238.

I will go through the (needless) steps I took as I tried to make this work, so if you want just the results, feel free to skip to the end.

At first, some quick google-fu led me to this post on the EVE-O forums suggesting the Macports install of wine with:

winetricks dotnet20winetricks dotnet30winetricks gdiplus 

I tried it and - surprise - the application quit. The window complained of a settings file, and sure enough, a quick look at the log yielded:

[1] DEBUG MentatException – Creating exception: Failed to load settings file C:\Program Files\EVEMentat\Storage\EVEMentat.settings

Turns out EVE Mentat had been ported to .NET 4.0 since that post was made, so it was completely useless for my purposes. So I tried the first thing that came to mind:

winetricks dotnet40

Who would've guessed:

[1] DEBUG MentatException – Creating exception: Failed to load settings file C:\Program Files\EVEMentat\Storage\EVEMentat.settings

Next I tried making a new 32 bit Wine prefix, this time resulting in an error that .NET 4.0 had not been installed, even though I ran winetricks with the new prefix specified. Not one to be deterred, I continued my search. I stumbled upon an old post I had made on the EVE Mentat website when I tried doing this back in December 2013. I posted the log file (with the same problem regarding the settings file) and received this response from the man himself, Thart:

@JCMD Looks like EVE Mentat unable to load one of its libraries.Please reinstall your .NET, download fresh copy of EVE Mentat and unzip it WITH PRESERVING folder structure.

I must have read this reply a thousand times before the solution occurred to me: what if one of the other modules I was installing was interfering with the .NET 4.0 libraries required my EVE Mentat? Being the daring and adventurous man I am, I deleted my Wine prefixes and started anew. This time, I only ran one command through winetricks:

winetricks dotnet40

Running EVE Mentat in this new prefix succeeded! Next, some final operations to make sure importing orders and market details works properly. Open up a Terminal window and enter the following:

ln -s ~/Library/Application\ Support/EVE\ Online/p_drive/User/My\ Documents/EVE/logs/Marketlogs ~/EVE/logs

After running this command, your Marketlogs should be available for EVE Mentat to use. Next, we need to get the cache scraping feature operational. To do this is simple: in the EVE Mentat preferences, set the path of your game correctly. It should be similar, if not identical, to mine, but make sure that the drive letter in your wine is correct:

Z:\Applications\EVE Online.app\Contents\Resources\EVE Online.app\Contents\Resources\transgaming\c_drive\Program Files\CCP\EVE

Next up, we need to make another symlink between the cache folders of the Wine install and the Mac one:

ln -s /Users/[USERNAME]/Library/Application\ Support/EVE\ Online/p_drive/Local\ Settings/Application\ Data/CCP "/Users/[USERNAME]/.wine/drive_c/users/[USERNAME]/Local Settings/Application Data/CCP"

Remember to replace [USERNAME] with your actual username. Now, in the preferences for EVE Mentat, make sure you specify the temp folder as well as the game path (the temp folder is called something like "c_program_files_ccp_eve_tranquility").

Now, only one issue remains: every time I try to import orders from the cache, I get an error code -1 that the cache import failed. This appears to be an ongoing issue with EVE Mentat that should be fixed in version 2.0, according to Thart. However, this entire setup doesn't take very long to implement so long as you're not trying to troubleshoot as you do it, so there might not be too much harm in trying out the above steps and seeing if it works for you.

If any of you brave souls manage to get the cache import feature working, be sure to comment! Until next time, fly safe o7