Installing CBM .Prg Studio on Mac / Linux with Wine / Crossover

CBM .Prg Studio is THE IDE (Integrated Development Environment) software for people who want to build Commodore 64 games in 6502 Assembler and Commodore BASIC, but it was developed for Windows.

How can we install CBM .Prg Studio on Mac and Linux?

I struggled for a while, went to Twitter for help, and while trying to explain the problem .. solved it myself!

This came up as an issue again due to my releasing the first in my Commodore 64 BASIC programming series – it really does make a lot of sense to build using CBM Prg Studio as your all in one solution once you start developing more complex C64 games and software.

Now I am using a licensed version of Crossover on MacOS 10.15, but Crossover is really just a wrapper around the free Wine so hopefully the answers I give here are equally useful in that scenario.

It’s Not Just Vice and CBM .Prg Studio – See if you get these errors in Crossover / Wine

These tips will also help you install other Windows cross-development and retro coding software such as CharPad and SpritePad!

I was getting the very helpful Crossover or Wine error

Command Results: The command ... returned 255

Crossover Doesn’t Give Nice Helpful Error Messages

Fortunately this is an error I came across when installing CharPad Pro, which I managed to get working by installing the 32bit version under Windows 10 32 bit.

This got me a little closer to the solution …

CBM Prg Studio and Vice Under Wine – Mistakes and Solutions

The main mistakes I made before were:

Trying to install under Windows 64bit
Relying on the installer
Attempting to use GTK

This might or might not make sense, but trust me this is what solved the issues I was having.

Checking the logs you might find more cryptic errors. Things like:

sku=L".NETFramework,Version=v4.6" not implemented

ieframe:navigate_url Unsupported

and

exec:SHELL_execute flags ignored

The software might even run, but with a blank/black screen, or with non-functional buttons.

Or it might come right out and tell you that you need Wine Mono.

Crossover and Wine have containers called “Bottles” – you need to use 32 bit Windows

This is because there DLLs and other things missing but it would be too easy for it to explain that 😉

Steps to Install CBM .Prg Studio in Wine / Crossover

You will need:

Wine or Crossover (obv), plus …

Windows 10 32 Bit “Bottle”

In Crossover this is done using the New Bottle option in the Bottle menu (I believe Wine has a thing called WineBottler – if there is enough demand I will create a tutorial for Wine users). Make sure you choose the regular Windows 10, NOT 64-bit.

Microsoft .NET Framework 4.6 + Possibly/Probably also Wine Mono

Right click on the Bottle and Select Install Software Into

CBM Prg Studio + Vice (32 bit)

Download CBM .Prg Studio and run the installation

Vice 32bit SDL version – GTK doesn’t work for me – extract the files to the C:\ drive that was created within the Windows 10 Bottle installed earlier.