Spider-Man 2 T-Pose Fix for M1 to M4 Macs (Beta)

Fixes characters stuck in a T-pose, and the symbiote drawn as spikes or a flat black sheet (or missing), in Marvel's Spider-Man 2 on Macs with an M1, M2, M3 or M4 chip, played through CrossOver.

Without the fix	With the fix

The app

How to use it

1. Download the latest release (Spider-Man-2-T-Pose-Fix.zip) and unzip it.
2. Quit Spider-Man 2, then quit Steam inside CrossOver (Steam › Exit), then quit CrossOver itself (CrossOver › Quit CrossOver).
3. Open the app (it's signed and notarized by Apple; macOS asks once whether to open an app downloaded from the internet). It finds the game by itself, even in a Steam library on an external drive; otherwise drag the Marvel's Spider-Man 2 folder (the one with Spider-Man2.exe) into its window.
4. Click Apply Fix, then start the game from CrossOver as usual.

Remove Fix in the same window puts everything back. If the game updates, the fix pauses itself until you open the app and click Update Fix. Quit Steam and CrossOver first for these too.

Note

This fix changes a setting in your CrossOver bottle. CodeWeavers can't support CrossOver while the fix is applied. Before contacting CrossOver support, click Remove Fix to put the bottle back as it was.

What's wrong, and what the fix does

On M1 to M4 Macs, Apple's D3DMetal (the graphics layer CrossOver uses) returns zeros when a shader reads a "typed" buffer past element 268,435,456 (2^28). Spider-Man 2 keeps every character's mesh in one 2 GB buffer and reads it exactly that way, so characters stored in its upper half never get animated and stay in a T-pose. Writes past that element are lost the same way, and the game writes the symbiote's triangles into the upper half of that buffer every frame, so the symbiote is drawn from leftover data (spikes, a flat black sheet) or not at all.

The fix makes the game read and write that buffer the "raw" way, which works to the end. The app puts a small d3d12.dll, a settings file and four rewritten shaders in the game folder, and sets one Wine setting in the bottle (d3d12 = native,builtin for Spider-Man2.exe). The shaders are built on your Mac from your own copy of the game and checked against the verified versions, so no game files are included here. The game and CrossOver themselves aren't changed, and the DLL does nothing unless it finds the exact game version it was set up for.

A report for Apple, with a standalone repro, is in vendor-report/.

Building it

• The app: app/dev-setup.sh on an Apple Silicon Mac (builds Microsoft's shader tools once, runs the tests, builds and opens the app). Source in app/.
• The DLL: ./build.sh (needs brew install mingw-w64 or zig); source in shim/fix.c, tests in tests/.

Public domain (Unlicense). Not affiliated with Sony Interactive Entertainment, Insomniac Games or Marvel.