I have tried and researched many different troubleshooting methods to try and tweak and have AOM EE run on a MacBook Pro M1 Pro computer and have been unsuccessful. Below is what I have tried:
For Crossover
To get the game running you will have to follow the following steps:
1. Install Crossover 22.01.
2. Install steam into a windows 7, 64bit bottle.
3. Login to steam, install Age of Mythology Extended Edition.
4. The game will not open past the launcher giving an error "MSXML 4.0 is not installed correctly and is required to run the game", this is due to the fact that the MSXML files packaged with the game are not compatible with windows 7. Installing steam into a windows 10 bottle does not seem to help. To get around this, you will need to open your C: Drive, -> windows -> system 32 -> delete all dll files with the root "msxml" (msxml2.dll, msxml3.dll, etc...) Open C: Drive -> windows -> syswow64 -> delete all msxml files here as well.
5. go back to crossover, click "install application into bottle" search up msxml, install all compatible msxml files.
6. The game should now run.
The game has a noticeable stutter resulting in low performance. I have tried to remedy this through a variety of methods:
1. Installing application into bottle "DirectX for modern games".
2. Installing dxvk from this site https://github.com/marzent/dxvk/releases and replacing the files with the files installed from that site.
3. Attempting to run the game with dxvk enabled, attempting to run the game with it disabled.
4. Attempting to run the game with CSMT enabled, attempting without it enabled.
5. Attempting to run the game with ESync enabled, and again with it disabled.
6. Attempting to download and run the game in a windows 10 bottle.
7. Attempting to download and run the game in a windows 7, 32bit bottle.
In the end, none of these attempts have been successful and the performance remained the exact same no matter what setting arrangement I had selected. The game can be played, but is just not enjoyable.
For Parallels
The game runs straight out of the box perfectly, and seems very promising with respect to performance. Unfortunately the game crashes anywhere between 15 - 25 minutes into the game in both singleplayer and multiplayer. I have had one game last beyond 40 minutes, but still ultimately crashed. There is no error dialogue that pops up, and the game just crashes straight to windows desktop.
Upon inspecting Event viewer there was two crash reports with Event ID 1000 citing a KERNALBASE.dll faulting path error, however this crash report does not show up after every crash, and despite multiple attempts over the past week to get this game running through parallels, there has not been a new error code since last week (even through several crashes a day).
I tried many different settings from windowed mode, to fullscreen, to different resolutions, to different core counts, ram allocations, folder sharing settings, optimization for games, etc.. and nothing seems to effect the crash behaviour. I could not find a solution for this unfortunately. Very disappointing since the game runs so flawlessly before it crashes.
