Steam Forum

Apologies if this has been asked, I've tried finding it on the support forum and can't seem to see this coming up before.

I purchased the Steam version of The Dig that just got released last week and have it running fine on my PC. This is my first time using CrossOver so I'm running the trial, but I wanted to see if this would work on my MacBook. Steam installed fine and I went to download the game through the GUI, where it downloaded with no issues (and I see that the files exist on the computer), but when I go to launch the game I get the "Launching The Dig" dialog, then it disappears and nothing happens.

Am I doing something wrong or is there some other step involved in getting the game to run? I can't see The Dig listed in the compatibility database in either the Steam or CD version, but other LucasArts games are, so I assumed it should work.

I thought I might be the only one diving into this. ^^

No, I am having the same trouble with The Dig (as well as the other SCUMM titles: Loom, Indiana Jones/Atlantis, Indiana Jones/Last Crusade). Only possible random reason I can think of is that these are all former DOS titles that were plopped into a Windows wrapper, then wrapped in Steam. Pure wild speculation there.

(Side note - the steam version of the games tweaked the files themselves a bit, leaving them not working with SCUMMVM. Known issue, not at all related to Codeweavers or CXG. )

Some older games on Steam are indeed wrapped into dosbox. I think the Windows version of DosBox works on Linux, I am not sure about OSX. It is certainly a tricky piece of software, it requires many low level things to work, not all of which are under our control - some have to be set up the right way by the operating system.

Maybe you can coax Steam into using OSX dosbox instead of Windows dosbox. The approximate way to go would be to install DosBox, then create a shell script dosbox.exe (or whatever the windows executable name is), which calls OSX/Linux dosbox and converts C:\program files\ style paths to Unix paths using the "winepath" helper app, and calls OSX/Linux dosbox. Use that script to replace the original dosbox.exe app. What I don't know though is how to tell Steam not to unpack the original dosbox.exe again.

As far as I'm aware the Steam versions of these games aren't using ScummVM or DosBox.

http://www.joystiq.com/2009/07/08/psa-lucasarts-steam-distributed-games-dont-work-on-scummvm-b/

http://sev-notes.blogspot.com/2009/07/steam-releases-vs-scummvm.html

They're supposedly just recompiled using an engine created by someone on the LucasArts team, I think.

I feel like this has a lot to do with not using the latest directx version. I didn't use my windowsXP machine in months and had to update directx on there before i was able to play Braid. I kept getting the same error that currently get on Monkey Island Special Edition. I can't help but feel this is Steam's attempt to stop Crossover people from using those games but i doubt it.