The game already works perfectly with CrossOver and Wineskin on OS X. I've got it installed in Wineskin (using WS9Wine1.5.25AMDSpeedHack), with the SS2 Rebirth and SS2 SHTUP mods, on a MacBook Air (GeForce 320M, 10.7.5) and a MacBook (GMA 950, 10.6.8) at full screen resolutions, and it works flawlessly.

It does work fine in singleplayer, but I'm having issues getting it to work in multiplayer. When I go to join/host a game, there is no ip address.

I don't really get this argument. If it's this easy, why doesn't GOG do that for their port? They've done it with other games. I would rather have someone whose job it is to sell games keep track of the compatibility issues instead of having to fine tune things myself.

The same reasons why they don't just release *all* of their games with WINE wrappers: support, and legal rights. It would take them additional time and resources to properly test and troubleshoot the game for OS X, potentially pushing back the release by weeks, or even months. As noted above, there's the likely probability that the game may not work in multiplayer (which I didn't test, since I almost always play games for the single-player experience, or play multiplayer with bots). GOG would have to test and troubleshoot that issue, either with WINE, or the game itself.

So yeah, it's their job to keep track of the compatibility issues. It likely because of compatibility issues that they haven't released an OS X version yet.

Then there's the legalities. The legal troubles surrounding this game are legendary, and I can only imagine what GOG and Night Dive had to go through to even get the Windows rights. How much more trouble would OS X rights entail? Or Linux rights for that matter? It took GOG a full year to figure out how to first get even just a fraction of their library on the Mac - that was a non-trivial effort for games which were pretty clearly legally defined. I think it's safe to assume that for GOG to get full Mac distribution rights would be a decidedly non-trivial effort.

That all being said, if it works in WINE – even if it works well enough with some features not fully working at 100% – I'm not going to let the above get in the way of me enjoying the game.

To the best of my knowledge, none of the Mac OS X titles GOG offers for sale have wine wrappers. They either 1) are DOS games that ship with DosBox or scumvm 2) were released by their authors as native Mac OS X programs. GoG don't port anything. They can't, they do not get to play with the source code.

So let's assume that they decide to support Linux and Mac OS X by using Wine. How should they go about it? Issue wine wrappers for each title they plan to support ? Do the wine wrappers contain the same code ? Did they hit issues that were fixed by some hacks which break another game? Hmm , this can potentially lead to them maintaining a few branches of the same code. Is it worth it ? Or, do they pay wine devs to chase down the bugs and fix them? Codeweavers go potentially do that. It's one of their biz models but I doubt they really have the manpower to fix all the things. They're a small company.

Not true the following use Wine: Avernum 1-3, Geneforge 1-5, Fallout 2, to name a few. GOG has been using Wine for a at least a month now, they even thank the wineskin guys on the thank you page: http://www.gog.com/thanks

That is why I said "to the best of my knowledge" ;)

I know which is why I said something.