Issues with Age of Empires 2 on MacBook Air M5 - Tahoe 26.4

[Kanonym]

Setup:

• MacBook Air M5, macOS Tahoe 26.4
• Sikarugir (WS12WineSikarugir10.0 engine)
• D3DMetal graphics layer
• Steam installed via Winetricks
• Game: Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition

Issue

Assertion failed!
Program: C:\windows\system32\mmdevapi.dll
File: mmdevapi_private.h
Line: 67
Expression: !status

I receive multiple issues always revolving around the DLLs. It sometimes works but it's not very stable. I need to constantly restart wine and even the laptop to make it work.

This error appears when AoE2 itself tries to start, causing a hard crash back to Steam.

Workaround found (works only sometimes):
Adding -nosound to AoE2's Steam launch options bypasses the crash and gets the game running. However this workaround is inconsistent — it worked reliably in one session but failed in subsequent sessions without any configuration changes.

Additional observations:
The issue may be related to the M5 chip and/or macOS Tahoe 26.4 as this is a very new hardware/OS combination
The crash appears to be tied to Wine's mmdevapi audio initialization failing on startup
Switching between D3DMetal, DXMT and DXVK made no difference to the audio crash
The game ran successfully once on first install, then began crashing consistently after the AoE2 update 170934 (March 12)

Question:
Is mmdevapi.dll known to have issues on M5/Tahoe 26.4? Is there a proper fix beyond -nosound, such as disabling the audio driver via registry or a Wine environment variable?

[leetcoderman]

Noticed something: (On portingkit)
When I connect with my Airpods and launch the game, it works smoothly.
as soon as I remove the airpods and disconnect them (putting them back in the case), the game crashes.
It doesnt launch when audio output is macbook speakers.

[8102]

Should this be moved to the Issues section of the repository?