Community Forums - Unsupported Builds

Are there any settings I can change on my Mac to make The Neverhood run more smoothly? or am I just lucky that I can play it at all with crossover?

It's a fairly old game (DOS/win95), and some of these types
of games run better using something like 'scummvm'...but...
I have found a download link for this title, so I'll grab
it when I get a moment and try it under crossover (I'll be
testing in linux, which doesn't directly reflect your own
situation, but I may see/learn something along the way)

Yeah, I've got it running in Windows 98 with crossover, and the figuring out puzzles and moving around like you would in a normal game is fine, its just the moving around in open spaces with movie like quality and cinematic parts that are really slow. I can't quite explain it, but its like the frames per second have been halved, and the sound isn't in sync with the cinematic parts either... :(

Just one question...are you using the original game,
or the patched version that is playable on winxp?

I don't have a clue, the copy I have is on a burnt disk that was given to me about 8 or 9 years ago.

Ahh, okay...thanks. More later....

Okay, now I see what you mean...on the first opening
animation when you start the game, I get 1 frame every
1.5 seconds or so...(I think that's worse than the 70mhz
pentium machines it was designed to run on ;) Anyhow...

What we're seeing, is something called the 'Smacker Video
Codec Library', which is a 256colour 8bit a/v codec used
last century for video games like this one. The functionality
is provided by the 'smackw32.dll' which the game installs.
Between 2002-2006 the smacker lib was changed, bugfixed and
improved for better compatibility with winXP and new CPU
designs, but best I can figure it this game uses a really
old release of smacker, and so changing smackw32.dll for
a newer version simply crashes the game (no surprizes there).

Even in XP, this game is supposed to be run in win95 compat
mode, and the winXP patch I mentioned earlier has nothing to
do with graphics - it just allows XP to load a saved game.

As you point out, the actual gameplay is quite acceptable
however....just the cut-scenes and animations are truly
annoying. I tried running it in a recent Wine version, and
the results are the same, but I found an old thread detailing
how to get it to run in Wine...circa. 2003...and how to run it
without the cd (it's a less than trivial procedure ;) I might
have one last swing at it tomorrow using dosbox just to see
how things go, but it looks like we're at the limit here running
it under crossover, and I doubt there's anything one can do to
make it run any better with animations & cut-scenes.

If I discover anything new, it'll turn up in the app's forum
on it's compatibility database page ;

http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/name/?app_id=429

Okey dokey, well thank you for trying : )

hey Kate,

there are detailed posts about how to get Neverhood running in wine (check the Wine App Database at WineHQ).
bottom line, you need to use wine version 1.0.1 or less. Now on a mac, you might try something like Darwine or PlayOnMac (at least the last one allows you to choose the wine version to use for a specific app). I tested this in a rather convoluted way (wine 1.0.1 on ubuntu under Virtualbox) and it works nicely (cutscenes and all).

regards,
mihai

I just got around to checking this with the COG-8.0beta/release_candidates,
and I can tell you this title now runs =much=much= better ; when 8.0 finally
ships, I would advise upgrading you crossover-games ;D