The GOG.com version of Gothic II Gold Edition works fine in both windowed & fullscreen modes in CrossOver Games 9.1.0, albeit the installation procedure is a bit convoluted. Many of the necessary steps are the same as described in the other tips in this section, but there are some very important differences, so keep on reading!
Here are the detailed, fully tested installation steps for the GOG.com version under CXG 9.1.0:
Install the game as an Unsupported Applications/Other Application into a new winxp bottle called Gothic II by using the GOG.com installer setup_gothic_2_gold_edition.exe. After the successful install, press the Exit Installer button.
If you tried to start the game at this point, your efforts would be awarded with an error dialog informing you that the Vdfs32e.exe had crashed. Luckily enough, renaming the file Vdfs32.exe to something else – for example to Vdfs32e.exe.bak – fixes the problem, since it's not really needed to run the game. The file is located in the directory Program Files/GOG.com/Gothic 2 Gold/system inside your Gothic II bottle. You can find your application bottles in the ~/Application Support/CrossOver Games/Bottles/ directory. Alternatively, select the Configure > Manage Bottles... menu in Crossover, select the Gothic II bottle on the left, activate the Advanced tab and then press the Open C: Drive in Finder button.
Now you could get past the intro movies but don't start the game yet, since it would crash as soon as you got to the main menu screen. Well, the culprit is the in-game music, so we'll have to disable that by hacking the game's configuration file a bit. To do this, navigate to the directory Program Files/GOG.com/Gothic 2 Gold/system as described in step 2 and open the file Gothic.ini with a text editor of your choice. Find the line musicEnabled=1 and change it to musicEnabled=0. Unfortunately, this also disables the in-game music, but if you're like me and you don't exactly enjoy wandering around in forests and exploring dungeons while listening to the same repetitive one-minute long semi-classical music the whole time, then this side effect won't be so unwelcome to you after all... While you're at it, it's also highly recommended to turn off the mandatory tedious intro videos by changing the value of the playLogoVideos property from 1 to 0. Please note, that I also tried the Windows native DLL changing tricks to get the in-game sound working, as described in other tips in this section, but that only resulted in a different type of crash at startup. Anyway, for reasons outlined above, I didn't really care.
By default, the game would run in 800x600/16bit and if you tried to change the screen resolution from the in-game menu, the game would inevitably crash with an Access Violation / Assert Failed error. To change the screen resolution, you'll have to manually edit Gothic.ini again. Here are the config settings for my 15" MacBook Pro; you can change the X and Y values to your desired resolution, of course:
Changing the display resolution is all well and good, but unfortunately it causes a thick black bar to appear around the bottom part of the screen, moreover, it transforms the game launching process into a somewhat stochastic experience... In plain English, the game would sometimes start, but at other times it would only greet you with a blank white screen with the menu music playing in the background and just hang there. To remedy that, select the Configure > Manage Bottles... menu in Crossover, select the Gothic II bottle on the left, activate the Control Panel tab, select Wine Configuration and then press the Launch Selected Item button. In the appearing Wine configuration dialog select the Graphics tab, uncheck the Allow the window manager to decorate the windows and Allow the window manager to control the windows options and then press Apply and OK (you don't necessarily have to do this if you decide to stick to the default 800x600 screenmode).
Phew! Congratulations, you did it! Now lay back and launch the game... only to discover that after your trials and tribulations all you get is another cheerful Access Violation message. Fear not, close the dialog and edit the configuration again (you can find these values at the end of the file):
gameStartFailed=0 gameAbnormalExit=0
This might not be strictly necessary, but at least it speeds the initial startup of the game up a bit. Now launch the game again. Well, the main screen appears but you can't use the arrow keys to navigate the menu so just press the left mouse button to start a new game. Enjoy the nice intro sequence and witness another fine crash just when the actual gameplay would commence... By now you probably got the hang of the whole thing, so you automatically open Gothic.iniand reset gameStartFailed and gameAbnormalExit to 0. That's fine, but since the game reset musicEnabled to 1 after the last crash in a rather sneaky way, you'll have to zero that one out too. After you're done start Gothic II again, and voila, the cursor keys are finally working in the main menu. Start a new game, endure the unskippable intro cutscene for the second time and then meet Xardas – hopefully in hi-res & widescreen! Now enjoy this wonderfully immersive game and go kill some goblins!
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