FINAL FANTASY XIV is an MMORPG for Windows, macOS, and PlayStation. The Macversion is essentially an identical build of the Windows version, except itruns in a customised version of Wine. The launcher/ patcher for FFXIV is pretty famously disliked, and for Windows users there’sa very good custom one, butunfortunately it doesn’t work for Mac.So I made my own.

One of the more interesting challenges in doing so was dealing with how theFFXIV Launcher passes arguments between the launcher and the main gameexecutable. In this post, I’ll do a deep dive into my journey of discovery toreimplement this logic in Swift.

Why A Custom Launcher?

My launcher isn’t anywhere near as featureful as XIVLauncher. I don’t reallyhave the time to dedicate to reimplementing its enormous feature set, plus someof its features would be very difficult to implement in macOS due to its oneroussecurity policies and the fact that the game runs in Wine.

Unzip the file provided, and copy or move the folder 'pcsx2-v1.5.0-dev-512-g7f3f6e9-windows-x86' to the location of your 'drivec/Program Files' folder. This is usually in homeWine Files, but if it's not, you'll have to track down your prefix. I had to do this by using the file explorer option in the wine. Download Visual Basic 6.0 Runtime Plus for free. The complete and extended version of Visual Basic 6.0 runtime library. This is the complete package of runtime files and redistributable libraries for running or distributing applications written in Visual Basic 6.0 and together with some third-party redistributable components.

That said, the main things my launcher brings to the table are:

The latest release of the PCSX2 Mac port. Source: Subcategories: 0: Files: 1: The source code of each PCSX2 release can be found here. PCSX2 is under the GPL v2/v3 license. Nba 2k14 trainer aleczou. Tools: Subcategories: 4: Files: 19: Here you will find some useful tools (including the BIOS dumper) for usage with PCSX2.

A Native macOS User Interface

The default launcher, already largely just a Web View, also runs in Wine, sothe experience is extremely jarring and out of place on a Mac.

Save Password

On macOS username + password combos can be safely and securely stored in theKeychain. The default launcher only allows you to save your username.

The Algorithm

If you load up Process Explorer on a Windows machine while FFXIV isrunning you will see something like this:

Notice how the application is started up with just one argument:

This whole mess is what we are going to attempt to reimplement. Thankfully, someenterprising developers have already documented how this formatworks, plus XIVLauncher already exists, and works. So it should be a fairlysimple matter of just copying what they’ve done, right?

Dealing with `GetTickCount`

As per the XIV Dev docs, the plaintext arguments are first encrypted usingBlowfish, using GetTickCount() & 0xFFFF0000 as the encryption key.Hang on, what is GetTickCount()?

According to the Windows developer documentation, GetTickCount is a function provided by kernel32.dll, which gets the numberof milliseconds since the system was started.

Well, that’s a problem, it’s easy enough for XIVLauncher to simply DllImportfrom kernel32 to call the exact same underlying function that FFXIV itselfuses, but we can’t do that on macOS. The exact semantics of how it works has tobe identical to whatever the Wine shipped with FFXIV for Mac does, otherwise thekeys won’t match and the game won’t be able to decrypt the arguments.

We know that the game will call GetTickCount() in Wine, so how does Wineimplement it? Thankfully, Wine is open source, so let’s crack open that sourcecode and get sleuthing. We know the function is provided by kernel32.dll inreal Windows, so perhaps it’s in wine/dlls/kernel32?

Sure enough, in sync.c we see:

So it reads it from some global variable user_shared_data, fair enough.Something else must write into user_shared_data->u.TickCount then. After a lotof digging I discovered wine/server/fd.c.

In fd.c we see:

Getting close, in the same file I can see that the global monotonic_time isset in set_current_time like:

So what is monotonic_counter()? Turns out, it is in request.c:

Eureka! However, this just raises another question: in the Wine shipped withFFXIV, does monotonic_counter() use mach_continuous_time, or does it usemach_absolute_time()???

Searching for wine mach_continuous_time brought me to an interesting patch in the Wine mailing list. Apparently some time in late 2019 they changed GetTickCount() on macOS to use mach_continuous_time(), since that better matches the behaviour of the real Windows implementation. Versions of Wine prior to that will use mach_absolute_time().

How do we know which version of Wine FFXIV uses? This is tricky to answer sinceit is not a bog standard Wine, but a specialised build from Codeweavers, thecompany which handled the FFXIV Mac port and are the primary maintainers of Wine. Running:

Very unhelpfully returns:

See what I mean about a specialised build? Well then nothing for it but to crackopen Visual Studio on my Windows machine and code up a test application.

Test Applications

Windows (C++)

I slapped together a very basic Console Application in Visual Studio C++:

Then I compiled it and copied it over to my Mac. Running it with:

Returns…

… nothing? What’s going on here? I would expect an error message, or asegfault maybe, but not nothing. After spending entirely too long going downthe wrong rabbit holes I realised that this version of Wine does not emitanything on the console unless you also provide --verbose. D’oh.

Finally, some console output! An error message:

Crap. This is the kind of error you would normally fix in Windows by installingthe Visual C++ Runtime. However, we need this to work just withwhatever is pre-installed in the Wine Bottle that FFXIV runs in…

Maybe it doesn’t like the 64-bit build? I know lots of software in Windows isstill compiled in 32-bit…

Wine C%2b%2b Runtime Library Error Pcsx2 Mac

Now returns:

OK, maybe not. Makes sense, anyway. FFXIV is 64-bit, plus Apple removed all32-bit support from macOS Catalina, and FFXIV is supposed to be fully supportedon macOS Catalina, so it must be a 64-bit bottle.

After some searching I discovered that VCRUNTIME140D.dll references theDebug builds of the Visual C++ Runtime, and turns out I did build it inVisual Studio in Debug mode. A quick recompile later, and…

Oh come on! At this point I decided to see if there’s a way to simply staticallylink the Visual C++ Runtime so it’d just be embedded in my .exe. Turns out,there is. In Visual Studio, right click the project, Properties. Then inConfiguration Properties → C/C++ → Code Generation, change the Runtime Library setting to Multi-threaded (/MT). A recompile and transferlater and finally it wor–

Oh. Guess it doesn’t like having the Visual C++ 2019 Runtime statically linked,huh. Hang on a minute, Visual C++ 2019, maybe that’s the problem? Maybe theWine Bottle only has an older Visual C++ Runtime. What’s the oldest C++ buildtools I can install for Visual Studio Community 2019?

The MSVC build tools available: v140, v141, v142.

Seems like it’s the tools from Visual Studio 2015, v140. Let’s install that,retarget the project to it, and try again.

Huzzah! Now, to find out whether this matches mach_continuous_time() ormach_absolute_time().

macOS (Swift)

I slapped together a very basic single file Swift application like so:

Compiling this, then running this more or less at the same time as my Wineprogram above:

Returns:

So you can see it’s a damn-near exact match for mach_absolute_time(). Finally!

Blowfish, Endianness, and Swift

I know I need something that can do Blowfish encryption, and the existing cryptography library I used doesn’t expose this algorithm,which means it’s time

Wine C%2b%2b Runtime Library Error Pcsx2 Mac