Deleting a saved command in Crossover Games

5th June 2008 – 8.28 am

Switching from the EU server to the US server in City of Villains meant I had to fiddle with my game installation a little bit. At least, it would have meant a bit of fiddling had I been running Windows. Instead, as I am running Crossover Games on my Mac, I ended up reinstalling the game from scratch. As is usual, I got myself a little confused and although I ended up with a working installation I ran in to a couple of problems.

I applied the fixes detailed in the Crossover forum for City of Heroes along with another hint to set the flag '-renderthread 1' that supposedly improves performance on a multi-core system. I found that the game then failed to load, so I deleted the saved command and tried to save a new command without the additional '-renderthread 1' flag. However, this new saved command was not appearing in the Crossover menu. This was a little inconvenient, because even though I was able to continue playing by running the game from the CohUpdater.exe file directly instead of the saved command I didn't know why the new saved command wasn't appearing.

It turns out that deleting a saved command is a little buggy and requires a few more steps to be performed before a replacement command can then be saved and displayed in its place. Crossover staff member Ken Thomases recently detailed these steps in a forum post:

First, you open a command-line shell configured to work with CrossOver. You can do this with the Open Shell button in the Debug Options of the Run Command dialog. Make sure you pick the proper bottle that you want to work with.

Next, you use the "cxmenu" command to query the menus to identify the "path" for the menu that needs to be deleted. It would be inside square brackets. The command is:

cxmenu --query

Suppose you saved the "notepad" command to the Programs menu. You might see an entry in the output of the above cxmenu command that looked like:

[StartMenu/Programs/notepad]
IDs=CXMenuMacOSX/

In this case the menu's path is "StartMenu/Programs/notepad".

Then, you issue a command to delete the menu you no longer want:

cxmenu --filter "StartMenu/Programs/notepad" --uninstall --delete

After that, you should be able to save a new command in place of the one you just deleted.

Sorry that this is such a hassle. We have improvements to this interface in mind, but it's pretty far down the list of priorities. (The whole "Save Command ..." feature was originally sort of a throw-away...)

I found this procedure to be fairly straightforward and that I was then able to save a new command again. As well as letting me apply the original fixes, although I find the '-usetexenvcombine' flag to be superfluous, it also lets me drop the saved command in to the dock next to other applications, rather than having the CohUpdater.exe sitting in the document partition of the dock.

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