Abe's Oddysee in a virtual machine (on mac)
 

I've been trying to get Abe's Oddysee running in a virtual machine (Virtual Box running Win XP) on a iMac (2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo). When I start Abe's Oddysee it resizes the virtual machine window, shows the copyright notice. It then goes black and I get very, very broken sound, CPU usage goes through the roof - strangely the icon sitting in the dock shows the screen properly, but not the main window. Every other Window's application I've ever tried has run OK.

Has anyone got Oddysee running in a virtual machine on a Mac, if so what did you have to do?

While I'm here I may as well gripe - I emailed this question to Steam support and they told me that they don't do support for this game, its third party. Does anyone know if/where the third party support for this game is - is this forum it?

Gilrod is the C.E.O for Just Add Water, he has an account here (look up "What's next for oddworld" thread), you can ask him.

If it doesn't matter to you so much how you get Abe's Oddysee working on a Mac, and you just want it to work any way possible, you could try Wine.

Building on a Mac (there are no official Mac binaries)

Looks like Abe's Oddysee works well

AO on Linux runs perfect ;) Did you install DirectX in your VM? it sounds the like FMV's are whats killing it.

With respect to lismati's post - don't message Gilrod. He hasn't had anything to do with AO.

AO and AE work perfectly on OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard with Wine. And actually there ARE official binaries, I never had to build it myself. To get it to work on Wine you have to change the Wine settings to have a virtual desktop though.

Problem solved
 

Thanks for the suggestions. I wasn't motivated enough to install Wine (I'm nearly out of space on the system drive). I did have DirectX installed on my VM, but after a bit more googling I found that there were problems in the past with VirtualBox and DirectX9.

I upgraded my copy of VirtualBox from 1.6 to 3.2.12. That has display options for 3D Acceleration and 2D Video Acceleration I enabled both of those and now it works! :fuzgrin:

I'm not sure which of these three things was the critical step. But its nice to see Abe back again.

Would the same thing work for the Steam versions?
My friends want to get the Oddboxx, but some of them have Macs and only Macs, so I though I'd ask on their behalf.

It should do. They'd probably need to run the PC version of Steam in Wine though.

Running it in WINE will be extremely slow (at least on my dual core 3ghz E8400 it is), VBox might give better performance! Wine may also have random crashes and graphical glitches on more complex 3D games that use directX, because wine will map the D3D calls onto OpenGL which is not a 1:1 mapping.

AO and AE will run fine and likely fast enough though.. don't hold your breath for Strange or Much though..

Yes, that is exactly what I am doing. I have a Win XP virtual machine (using a recent version of VirtualBox). I have steam installed on that virtual machine and am using it to run AO and AE. Its workable, but not great, sometimes response to key presses is a bit slow, but the games are playable.

I don't think that I'd like to try this method for modern games, but it works adequately for these older ones.

Thankyou very much, guys.
You've just saved two more Mac-using Oddworld fans from having a disappointed Christmas. You're lifesavers. :D