[Wine] Wine on Mac: subpar experience

[HunterZ]

So I installed Ubuntu on my PC laptop over the weekend and got a couple of old games working under Wine. Having previously heard that a Mac port of Wine exists, I then decided to try to get Baldur's Gate 1 working on my wife's MacBook Pro because she'd been mentioning lately that she would like to play it again.

We found and followed these instructions: http://davidbaumgold.com/tutorials/wine-mac/

It took a long time; apparently it actually had to build Wine from source. Once it was done we tried to run the Baldur's Gate installer from a disc and found that the Mac port of Wine has no support for 16-bit Windows apps (such as the SETUP.EXE for Baldur's Gate 1) due to some obscure issue with XCode.

Next we tried just copying the BG1 install from my Ubuntu setup to her system. That only sort-of worked: the X11 window server shipped with MacOS apparently doesn't support changing resolutions for fullscreen apps. The only workaround was to run Wine with a virtual desktop, which the game then reduces to a 640x480 window regardless of the chosen virtual resolution, so we were stuck running BG1 in a tiny 640x480 window on a 1920x1200 display.

What was even worse was that the game requires being able to move the mouse to the edges of the screen to scroll around, which proved impossible because the cursor would just move outside the Wine window. I know what you're thinking, but the seemingly-related setting in winecfg has no effect on the cursor escaping the window.

In short: we gave up.


I've heard about WineBottler - does anyone know if I'll get better results with it? I heard that it might be bundled with a different X11 server that can actually change resolutions. It seems geared towards wrapping single .exe apps though, so I'm not sure how well it would work with BG1 which has ~2GB of data files.