This weekend I unearthed my ancient Fallout CD, and decided to give it a try running under Crossover Games. (I'm on Crossover Games 10.1.2, on a newer Mac Mini with the GeForce 320M graphics card.) The installer refused to run in a Windows XP bottle, but installed just fine to a Windows 98 one. But the thing simply refuses to run; it crashes back to the desktop almost the instant you run it. I played around with lots of settings, virtual desktop sizes, upgrading it to the 1.1 patch, nothing makes any difference.
But, I tried installing the DOS version into DosBox, and that worked perfectly. Installs and runs smoothly. Unfortunately, the DOS version sacrifices some of the multimedia of the game to get it to fit into 640k; many characters who have spoken lines in the Windows version have nothing more than lines of text on the DOS one. :(
After reading on the forums how many folks have successfully installed and run the game on Crossover, I went ahead and purchased the game off of Steam to see if that would work. And voila, it runs immediately! And all the voice acting is there, just as I remember it.
On the other hand, I can see what people are saying about the mouse speed. Under DosBox, the mouse moves quickly and easily over the hex grid, but in the Windows version the movement over the grid is somewhat ungainly. Still usable, though -- I don't think it's unplayable, from what I see so far -- but much easier under DOS. Unfortunately, I don't think Steam provides the DOS version of the game, so I can't tell if it's a difference between the ancient copy from my CD and the presumably newer one from Steam. Maybe if I could get my ancient Windows version to work...
In any case, just a note on the many different results I'm getting from the many different versions of this game.
