I'm at a part late in the game where cowboys are shooting up the place. The game hints that I'm supposed to use the NO2 to stop them. It lets me put the NO2 on the rail of the balcony of the closed-down hotel, but after that, when I click the hand icon on it to try to activate it, the game freezes. Is this a bug that makes the game unwinnable?

Did you try everything suggested here?

https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/212457709-Stability-issues

Do you use DOSBox or ScummVM?

DOSBox I didn't see anything suggested there

Them I'm out. Sorry. I've never played the game using DOSBox.

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Didn't you.

Look again. There's a whole long list of links with suggestions for bunches of different scenarios. Just from that one section :

Stability issues

Crashing in general
Crash when an FMV intro or cutscene should be played
Game speed issues (too fast, too slow, uneven speed)
Screen freezes after launch (Intel HD graphics issue)
Disabling Windows 10 Game DVR
Deactivating Game Mode on Windows 10 with Creators update

Click the links dude. Click the links. And if none of that works, go down the suggestions on the side such as "If you are playing on a laptop that has 2 video processors". Whatever sounds like it might be appropriate.

You can also try running it in ScummVM. Check this thread for how to get it to run under ScummVM WITH both text and voice.

https://www.gog.com/forum/freddy_pharkas_frontier_pharmacist/speech_audio_and_text/post9

This is an issue specific to this game. I don't think general info is going to help here.

You seem to be determined not to be helped.

You don't know if its "specific to the game" until you try the options to fix problems like this. Those options are in fact specific to a whole range of titles from that era. Especially the Sierra games, these all had a lot of things in common regarding the hardware they were expecting to run on and the drivers they used. Lots of commonalities - hence these very very USEFUL suggestions for getting your game to work.

You navigate to that page (or I did anyway as you seem not to be interested in trying to solve your problem) from the Freddy Pharkas title - GOG has it set up to take you to technical help pages that are intended for specific games. This isn't the same set of tech info you would get if you started with, say, Witcher 3 looking for tech help.

If you won't try the proffered potential solutions, how do you know whether or not they will work?

If they DON'T work, THEN you can contact GOG Support and (unlike Steam) they will try to help you. But they will tell you to try EVERYTHING in the support articles I sent you first. Or I should say more accurately, everything RELEVANT.

So bite the bullet and try the offered solutions. Those are, in fact, specifically intended for Freddy Pharkas.

If you won't do that, and you won't try running it in ScummVM, as the other poster noted, I'm out. You can't help them as won't be helped.

Never mind, the solution was in the hint book.

You are not supposed to touch the NO2 bottle with your hand after you place it on the balcony. You are supposed to find another way to set the thing off. So, the game froze because I did something I wasn't supposed to do.

Glad its working for you again. It's a great game - I bought it when it was new and lost the manual in a move so couldn't finish it. By the time you could find copies of the manual and hint books online, I'd lost the disks, too, LOL!

I've been checking GOG, Al Lowe's site, and the Freddy Pharkas fan site once or twice a year for the last like 10 years waiting for it to appear on GOG. It must have been added to the GOG catalog just a few days after the last time I checked, LOL!

I'm lovin' it even more playing with both sound and (most) text.

It's got some absurd puzzles, mainly in act 2, and the voice acting is hit and miss. But overall yes it is an enjoyable game I have finished it now. I had heard mixed things about it. I'm glad it turned out to be a good game.