My laptop recently crashed and I've been wanting to play Planescape:Torment but the only computers in my house are just Macs.

If anyone has a suggestion,please let me know.

crossover games and wine are good places to start.

Unfortunately, unlike other games using the infinity engine (Baldur's gate and Icewind dale series), it looks like you may need some tweaking before you can get them to run. The posts there are quite old, and may not be up to date with latest versions of wine/crossover.

I may try it later tonight to see if I can get it to work.

So, the game doesn't like 32 bit depth, and trying to play it as is on either wine or crossover will just give you a blank screen.

The solution is to use the virtual desktop function, and it will then work. I didn't play much, but if you don't mind playing it in windowed mode, then wine/crossover is an option.

Another option would be virtualbox/vmware. I think this game is old enough to not need a fancy graphics card, so it may work there with no issues.

Another option is GemRB but unfortunately it's still in Beta
http://www.gemrb.org/wiki/doku.php

I'm successfully playing this game fullscreen inside VirtualBox on a 2008 Macbook. Have only just started but it seems to play fine.

Actually it's pretty sweet because with Lion I can use 4-finger swipe to switch between the game and a full-screen instance of Safari, very handy for looking things up while playing.

There are two options for you to play Planescape: Torment -

a) CrossOver 11.x - the latest version of CrossOver is built on the Wine 1.4 codebase; among the most egregious errors that they've fixed is the bug which prevents PS:T from running on computers running on millions of colours (32-bit depth, as karma_police mentioned). With that bug fixed, the game runs out of the box.

The problem is that it doesn't seem to play very well with the command-line install programs used with WeiDU to install mods like the widescreen mod and the various fix/tweak packages out there...so, AFAIK, you'd be limited to a vanilla install.

b) Wineskin with the WS8Wine1.4 engine - You can use Wineskin to create a standalone wrapper for PS:T; just make sure you use the WS8Wine1.4 engine in Wineskin Winery. The game installs and runs just fine out of the box, and it works with the command line installers for mods and fix/tweak packs.

Did you manage to play it with no issues at all? I've reinstalled on a clean bottle, but when I start it I just get a garbled screen (squares/rectangles of whatever is behind the game randomly positioned on the screen), and a faded strip of the game moving from the bottom up (which allowed me to cleanly exit the game). This happens before and after installing the widescreen mod. wine windowed mode seems to work ok.

It does not complain about bit depth, so that's an improvement. I guess I'll just have to figure out what is messing everything up.

As for the command line mods, there's a workaround for it. After you install the mod, the command execution window will stick around. This is because it spawned the command line part of the mod, and crossover isn't showing it. You can just close it.
On a new command execution window, write "wineconsole cmd" (no quotes). This will open a command line window, in which you can navigate to the game folder and after that you can just run the mod (dir *.exe inside the game folder will show you all the installed mods executables).

What are your system specs/OS? Are you trying this in Wineskin or in CrossOver? If the former, it's critical that you use a WINE 1.4 engine; if the latter, you have to use CrossOver 11, as it's the current version which uses the WINE 1.4.x codebase for its engine.

It's entirely possible that this could be a vendor-specific gfx hardware issue, as I've read reports about the game not liking Nvidia (or was it ATI?) cards. My experience outlined above was on a GMA 950.

yeah, this has all the markings of gfx issue, with corrupted textures and whatnot... Just for reference, I have a mid 2010 macbook pro, with an nvidia card, running the latest version of lion and crossover 11.02.

Not too worried about it yet. It's still on my back catalog, and I'm still playing BG2, so I probably won't get to it anytime soon. By then there will hopefully be an OS update or something that fixes the issue.

It started on my Wineskin as well when I upgraded to Lion from Snow Leopard. Winetrick to set DirectDrawRenderer to GDI instead of OpenGL fixed it for me.

Has anyone ever tried to run the game in VMWare Fusion? If you have enough ram and okish processor, it probably would be easy to run a VM of XP or 7. Its not like PST has massive resource requirements.

Where do I download Wineskin and Crossover?Can you give me the link?

CrossOver is available at Codeweavers, for $59.99. Codeweavers contributes to and directly supports WINE development, so paying for CrossOver is a good idea if you want to show that you want to support further WINE development.

Wineskin is free and available . I've seen doh123 post here a few times and he's a really nice guy who's been very helpful in getting games like NWN to run. You can also get help at the [url=http://portingteam.com/]Porting Team forums.

I'd strongly urge you to get CrossOver because the money you pay directly helps fund the development of WINE (and it works great with a huge variety of games on GOG), but if PS:T is all you want to play, Wineskin is the better of the two options (for the reasons I've outlined above). I've had all sorts of graphical oddities with WINE and CrossOver in my testing (usually enabling a virtual desktop or disabling full screen is what clears them up) and it seems to be a Lion specific issue. I'll bring it up on the Codeweavers forums and see what they think.

You can also use my wrapper up here: http://www.paulthetall.com/planescape-torment-mac.html

most of the gog.com games I already ported to the Mac on my site. So for this one and many others like baldursgate 2, Fallout tactics, pharaoh, Zeus, settlers 2 10th anniversary , Tombraider chronicles and Revelaton, Real Myst, Riven, Rollercoaster Tycoon and many many many others then take a look ;)

Hey man. I appreciate you making wrappers like this. BUT I am on Mavericks now, and I get an error while installing that says:
"Unable to execute file:
sdbinst.exe

ShellExecuteEx failed; code 2.
File not found."

Got the latest version from GOG for Planescape...
Hope you can help :)


EDIT: Nevermind! It worked even if I quit the installer, and chose Torment.exe as executable. Anyway, thanks a lot!