Running SquirtTheCat on Mac OS X (SOLVED w/ WINESKIN)

[HomeStarRunnerTron]

So, I'm pretty sure this forum is kind of dead, but I'm just wondering if there is possibly any help to had here!

First off, I have wanted to play Phantasmagoria & Phantasmagoria 2 for the past decade of my life, but have been too much of a pansy to do it on my own, to be honest. *cracks up* ANYWAY. Flash forward to my third year of college, first day of school, and one of my two best friends comes up to me and says, "Hey, Skye... you know about a game called Phantasmagoria?"

So turns out her long-time teacher is Paul Mitri, aka Trevor Barnes-- and spurred her on to look up the game. Which only made playing the game this Halloween for the very first time sweeter.

So we're halfway-into Disc 3, and I'd just like to thank the SquirtTheCat team IMMENSELY for making this playthrough completely possible to begin with. You've made three people incredibly happy on a Halloween night-- we played it for 6 straight hours and were deeply entertained-- the gameplay is seamless without hardly any loading time, the ISO switching was painless-- and NO stinkin' scanlines on all the video. Like, geez, how you gonna enjoy that cinematic goodness without the glorious colors intact? Now THAT was how I wanted to experience the game for the first time.

The only problem we experienced at all was that the cursor failed to work--
It wasn't a black box, like what most people seem to report!
It was just stuck on the hourglass loading cursor. THE WHOLE WAY.
So just to repeat what the title says -- I'm using a Mac OS X, playing it using XP on VirtualBox. I've installed the newest version of VirtualBox Guest Additions-- which is what I've heard is their version of graphics/video card add-ons. And I'm playing it on 32-bit. Full-screen and not-fullscreen & 800x600 don't seem to make a difference for resolution.

Anyway, if anyone can get back to me, I'd highly appreciate it. My guess is we'll find another chance to do a big game-run again in November. If anyone could get back to me by then, I'd highly appreciate it! Have a fantastic day and beyond, and get back to work, Ratboy.

Sincerely,
Skye

[Collector]

Have you tried WINE? Unfortunately, jafa, the developer of this installer has not been active for quite a while. I had at one time talked to jafa about making his Phant 2 installer more compatible with resource concatenation, but shortly after is when he disappeared from view.

I have installers for both Phantasmagoria games, too. Like this installer, they are made for Windows. They make use of DOSBox, which solves many issues. They also concatenate all of the discs so that there is no disc swapping at all. Both have been thoroughly play tested. The only drawback is that Phant 2 has interlaced cut scenes. Phant 1 does not. As to working on Mac, The installer *may* work through WINE. I know that my installers do work through WINE on Linux. If you do try it, you will want to replace the DOSBox it installs with a Mac build of it. You also may need to make new aliases to start DOSBox with the games' config files.

http://sierrahelp.com/Patches-Updates/N ... tasmagoria

I once had someone that had started making Mac versions of my installers but became too busy with a new baby, so it never came to be. I would love to have Mac and Linux version of my installers, but do not know scripting on either platform.

[HomeStarRunnerTron]

Have you tried WINE? Unfortunately, jafa, the developer of this installer has not been active for quite a while. I had at one time talked to jafa about making his Phant 2 installer more compatible with resource concatenation, but shortly after is when he disappeared from view.

I have installers for both Phantasmagoria games, too. Like this installer, they are made for Windows. They make use of DOSBox, which solves many issues. They also concatenate all of the discs so that there is no disc swapping at all. Both have been thoroughly play tested. The only drawback is that Phant 2 has interlaced cut scenes. Phant 1 does not. As to working on Mac, The installer *may* work through WINE. I know that my installers do work through WINE on Linux. If you do try it, you will want to replace the DOSBox it installs with a Mac build of it. You also may need to make new aliases to start DOSBox with the games' config files.

http://sierrahelp.com/Patches-Updates/N ... tasmagoria

I once had someone that had started making Mac versions of my installers but became too busy with a new baby, so it never came to be. I would love to have Mac and Linux version of my installers, but do not know scripting on either platform.

I haven't tried WINE! I'll give that a go. The whole idea of no disc swapping is quite nice-- (although it's still kind of fun to do) I just really hate interlaced cut scenes. I'm really impressed that YOU'RE the person who came up with those installers, though! I actually used the DOSBox Phantasmagoria 1 installer you're talking about. It doesn't work on VirtualBox, just so you're aware. Well, not WELL, at any rate. I'll try some other stuff. Are you the guy on those Sierrahelp forums with the huge magician avatar? If so, I'd just like to say you're one of my heroes. Me and my girlfriend are big fans of Freddy Pharkas, and we appreciated the fact that someone made a sub-forum for that game. Just reading other people talking about that game was incredibly validating. Thank you so very much for responding, and have a fantastic day!

[Collector]

The interlaced videos in GK2 and Phantasmagoria 1 are done through the scripts, so they can be turned off. Endroz created a script patch to do so for GK1 and in Phantasmagoria 1 it can be turned off in the game's settings. Both of these games used VMD videos and Phantasmagoria 2 uses DUK videos. I don't know how the interlacing was achieved with it, so I am not sure if it could be handled by the scripts.

Sierrahelp.com is my site. I am glad you liked it.

[HomeStarRunnerTron]

Wow, I can't believe that's a site under your propriety. You are truly a point-and-click legend. Thank you so very, very much.

By the way, through Wineskin Winery and a little finicking with the settings (and a lot of dumb luck), I was able to get SquirttheCat's Phantasmagoria 2 to work, no interlacing and the cursors intact. WOW. I wouldn't have thought to try Wine again without you. I'm thinking of doing a little video tutorial about it, but first I've gotta find a solution about if you want to switch ISOs instead of CDs... (TO BE CONTINUED) Just wanted to give my eternal gratitude, and may grand things come your way for your truly overwhelming patronage of the game-artssss.

EDIT: OKAY! Just gonna give a quick run-down of all I know right now about how this works.

1) Get WineSkin Winery
2) When you open it, click on the add button, and a big list of Wines should pop up. I just downloaded the newest version and selected it in the window afterwards.
3) Then I clicked update under Wrapper Version so the newest Wineskin was in there.
4) Then you click Create New Blank Wrapper. Call it whatever you want.
5) It'll probably ask you to download some things first time around-- and it'll take a little while, but in successive tries, it won't take long at all.
6) It'll tell you when the app is done being built, and then you click to view it in Finder, and open it up. It's like a bare-bones skeleton just waiting for some programming to fill it in.
7) Click Install Software, then Choose Setup Executable. From there, select the MSI file from SquirtTheCat.
8) Before proceeding any farther, make sure the first Phantasmagoria CD/ISO is booted.
9) Click Next, then make the CD-ROM Location the D drive. Click Next again, Finish.
10) A notice to Choose Executable should pop up afterward. Just make sure SIERRAW.EXE is selected, then click OK.
11) In Set Screen Options, also check Use Mac Driver instead of X11. SUPER IMPORTANT. It will only boot up for 2 seconds then freeze if you don't do this.
12) You can also change the Icon in Advanced settings. I changed mine to the normal icon. You can download the icon in icns format here.
13) After all this, you can close out and open up the application again, and it should run.
BUT!!! It'll freeze almost immediately afterwards. It does this rarely. If it does, just Apple-Option-Esc, bring up the Force Quit menu, then Apple-W to close. It'll start moving again.

---

For anyone using ISOs, whenever you need to switch CDs, go Apple-Option-Esc again, double-click the Finder to bring up some windows, and go into Terminal.

Type in
hdiutil eject -force /Volumes/[INSERT NAME OF YOUR DISC HERE]

Ex. All my ISOs are named PHANTAS2, so mine would be
hdiutil eject -force /Volumes/PHANTAS2

Then open up the next ISO, and go back to your game.

---

For anyone needing to transfer save files, they're not in the normal spot the DOSBox installer would put them in. This really threw me for a loop, because even searching for the names of those save files comes up as there being nothing of the sort, at least in WindowsXP.
First off, make sure you have all your invisible files checked as visible, then go to your Users folder, the username you're using, then into Application Data > Sierra > Phantasmagoria 2.

And everything you need will be in there. Finally, to put those files into your pre-packaged app, right-click the app and click on Show Package Contents. Go drive_c > users > Wineskin > Application Data > Sierra > Phantasmagoria 2.

---

And... that's all I got! If anyone knows how to make it so the DUK movie files NEVER make the app freeze up, that'd be awesome. But it only happens at the beginning and then sometimes when you switch CDs, but that's understandable.

[Collector]

As to the save location, that is something that jafa changed to make it more compliant with modern Windows so that user data is written in the user space. The game originally wrote saves to the game's directory. Installing legacy games inside the %ProgramFiles% folder can cause issues because of the write restrictions of non-administrators.

[HomeStarRunnerTron]

UPDATE, December 20, 2013: For anybody who gets the phrase "-bash: hdiutil: command not found" after you try to eject your ISO, just go Shell > New Command and type it there. It'll work. I'm not sure what cause my Terminal to stop working for me, but hey. At least there's a fix to it. Also nice is that that same command will stay IN the New Command box every time you open it. So that's a quick way to get the job done.