Ninja Gaiden 3 Razors Edge

NINJA GAIDEN 3: Razor's Edge

The game would not start at all, in any backend. It does now, at 60 fps, and its in-game cutscenes play. The boot movie freezes on its first frame and one click passes it; that part is not solved.

install-ng3-fix.sh applies it. Unlike every other installer here it takes a bottle, not a game folder, because nothing it does is inside the game folder — four DLLs go into the bottle's system32 and the override is a registry key. Nothing the game ships is touched.

Why it is the odd one of the Master Collection. SIGMA and SIGMA 2 import d3d11.dll and start fine. Razor's Edge is Direct3D 9 only — d3d9.dll and d3dx9_43.dll, no d3d11 anywhere — and that is the whole reason the other two work under DXVK and this one would not start at all.

The message it shows is a red herring. Under CrossOver's own DXVK it says "Insufficient VRAM. Please close all running applications." Its own log says what really happened, eleven times: DxvkAdapter: Failed to create device, after reporting transformFeedback: 0 and timelineSemaphore: 0. MoltenVK does not offer those and that DXVK requires them. Nothing to do with memory — DXVK reports the machine's full 49152 MiB two lines earlier.

Its videos are not Media Foundation. 24 files in databin/movie, all ASF containers, WMV3 video and WMAv2 audio at 1280x720, played through DirectShow — quartz and qasf. An afternoon went into instrumenting MFTEnumEx, both source readers and MFCreateFile before the winevideo developer said where to look. The codec was measured with ffprobe; the path was not, and the difference cost hours.

The recipe. Four overrides, all per-executable under HKCU\Software\Wine\AppDefaults\NINJA GAIDEN 3 Razor's Edge.exe\DllOverrides, so no other title is affected, with the DLLs placed in drive_c/windows/system32:

value	native,builtin	where it comes from
*d3d9	d9vk	Sikarugir-App/d9vk, d9vk-macOS-async-v1.10.3-20250511
*qasf	patched	winevideo 0.5 payload
*quartz	patched	winevideo 0.5 payload
*winegstreamer	patched	winevideo 0.5 payload

That d9vk is the same DXVK version CrossOver ships, 1.10.3, built differently for macOS. "DXVK 1.10.3 does not work on Apple silicon" was written here first and was wrong: CrossOver's build does not, this one does.

Result. The game starts, renders at 60 fps, reaches its menu, and its in-game cutscenes play. The boot movie decodes its first frame and freezes; one click skips it and the game carries on. Nioh was re-run afterwards and is unaffected, which matters because these DLLs sit in a shared system32 and only the per-app override keeps them out of everything else.

What is left, and why it may stay left. Adding winevideo's winegstreamer changed nothing observable. That fits: it is split into a PE half and a Unix .so, and only the PE half can be overridden per application, so the two halves no longer match. Chasing the boot movie means transplanting more of another engine into this one. winevideo 0.5 runs this title properly, because there all of these are one coherent build — that is the honest answer for anyone who wants the intro as well.

The binaries, and whose they are

Three of the four are other people's work and ship with the fix, because one

that only works for people who already installed something else is not a fix. d9vk is DXVK, zlib. qasf, quartz and winegstreamer are Wine, LGPL-2.1-or-later, patched by winevideo's author. ng3-THIRD-PARTY-LICENCES.md travels beside them with the sha256 of each file, and check-builds.sh verifies them against it — they cannot be rebuilt from a source in this repository, so a swapped binary is caught by its hash or not at all.

The diagnosis is winevideo's author's, and it is the part that mattered: Wine's DirectShow ASF Reader delivered a video sample on the WMReader callback, the downstream video pin blocked in Receive(), audio needed that same callback to preroll and never got it, and the graph sat in VFW_S_STATE_INTERMEDIATE instead of reaching Running. Their build moves blocking video delivery onto a serialized worker so audio can preroll. This project measured the codec, the renderer, and why CrossOver's DXVK cannot create a device.

Registry, and why it does not need a quiet bottle

The overrides are written through reg.exe inside the bottle and asked back afterwards, the way the Kingdom Hearts and NieR installers already did here. The first version of this script appended them to user.reg with a text editor and therefore had to refuse to run while a wineserver was alive — which for a launcher means quitting Steam and ending the prefix before it can even tell a user whether their game needs the fix. That requirement was an artefact of how four values were written, and it is gone.