• Graphical issues in the Mac version of Jolly Rover

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    29 Jul 2010 /  Gaming

    I’ve been trying out Jolly Rover, a doggie themed pirate adventure from indie developer Brawsome. It was released on Steam in June, but since i’ve only recently updated to Snow Leopard, this is the first time I could run Steam on Mac OS X (I tried it under CrossOver before but it was slooow). Incidentally, the Mac support in Steam is not bad, i’ll give it a review sometime I think.

    Unfortunately, if like me your Mac has an ATI X1600 graphics card (Macs from around 2006 I believe), you’ll experience graphical errors that make the game almost unplayable. According to the developer, this is due to a bug with PlayGround, the engine on which the game is developed, and the general bugginess of the X1600 cards themselves. One solution is to run the game under Windows using BootCamp. I would normally do that, but I managed to bugger up my Windows disc when I got my Mac back from the repair shop, so no Windows right now. Another alternative then, is to use Wine, and specifically in this case WineBottler by Mike Kronenberg.

    I’ve already posted about this in the relevant thread on the Steam forums, but here it is again for those who need to know:

    “It also works under Wine, for those of you who don’t have Windows installed via BootCamp.

    I’m not a Wine guru myself, but I found a really easy way to get it working using WineBottler by Mike Kronenberg. It’s a free program that lets you compile windows programs into standalone Mac applications. It’s still in Beta but it’s a nice GUI based approach to working with Wine options.

    At first, trying to install the game with WineBottler or CrossOver (another, commercial, approach to using Wine) the installer crashed with an error saying that isskin.dll could not be imported. I Googled the error and found I needed to install mfc42.dll. There’s a tool for Wine called WineTricks – a library of Microsoft dlls etc that you can install – and this is already included in the build of Wine that ships with WineBottler. I don’t know if it’s possible to do this sort of customisation with CrossOver however.

    The nice thing about using WineBottler, is you can compile everything into a single app. All you need to do is install mfc42.dll when you install Jolly Rover and it works fine:

    1) Select Create Custom Prefixes from the left hand menu
    2) Choose the Windows install file for Jolly Rover that you downloaded from the JR website
    3) In the WineTricks section, search for “mfc42″ and mark the checkbox next to it
    4) Click install and choose where to save it

    During the install, you will need to accept the T&C’s of the mfc42 installation (unless you ticked Silent Install) and click through a typical Windows installation wizard. Once installed, you will be asked what application should be run when the new prefix (think of it as the app you created) is run, so choose Jolly Rover from the options.

    Note, you will need the X11 framework installed to use WineBottler as this wraps around the program to make it work in Mac OS X. Chances are you already have it if you’ve used Gimp etc. When you run the program, you will see the X11 icon in your Dock. Don’t close this as it’s needed. In fact, the game will run in the X11 window so this is the ‘game’ in a sense.

    When running the game this way, I did find that it ran behind the Dock and menubar. To fix this, you can choose the Fullscreen option from the X11 preferences. However, once you exit the game, you will see a rather ugly greyness covering your screen. Scared the crap out of me as i’ve never seen it before, but it’s nothing to worry about.

    Turns out this is because X11 is actually still running in fullscreen mode. Unfortunately, it disables the usual Finder commands like Command-Tab, so to toggle out of fullscreen mode, you can press Command-Option-A, or to close X11 completely Command-Q. You can also use Command-Option-Escape and Force Quit X11. In the preferences, there is an option to autoshow the menubar. If you tick this, you can close X11 from the menu when you mouse near the top of the screen. I’ve also noticed that running it this way, it runs in its original 800×600 resolution in the middle of the screen, rather than being scaled up like it is via Steam.

    For those of you who don’t want the hassle of compiling an app with WineBottler (it’s really easy, honest), i’ve uploaded a compiled demo of Jolly Rover for you. I’ve ticked the option to make it a self-contained version, meaning it includes the Wine binaries, so you don’t need Wine installed.

    Created on Mac OS X Snow Leopard so i’m not sure if it will run on Tiger, but I have a Tiger install handy that I can test on later (or just let me know). You can download it here. It’s larger than the size of the original installer download because it’s the demo game itself (and presumably because of the Wine files). I can’t really keep it up indefinitely, so maybe Brawsome will want to host the file or at least link to my post here?”

    Expect a review of the game soon.

    [ Posted by your humble author Rambo @ 1:07 am ]

  • A box to call home

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    04 Jul 2010 /  Web Design

    In the long, drawn out embarrassment that is my attempt to finish a custom WordPress theme, one thing I keep coming back to is my choice of categories.

    Up until now, and for the foreseeable future, this blog has been somewhat of a catch-all for all my interests – games, technology, software, the internet, robotics, sci-fi, fantasy, reading, writing, animation, 3D modelling -, the list goes on and on. An unfortunate side effect of this rabble, is the lack of a directed focus overall.

    Now, I have to admit that the lack of focus has been mostly intentional. When I first started this blog on Blogger back in 2005 – and *shiver* the stuff back there is particularly horrid - a major concern was that I wouldn’t have enough to say on any one topic. At the time I was still crazy about Cowboy Bebop (and I still am), but despite a reference in the title, the blog never became a fansite. Instead, i’ve just blogged about anything and everything that took my fancy.

    I still intend to keep doing that since, as with much of my life, i’m a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. I wouldn’t feel particularly qualified to write a whole blog on any particular subject, but more importantly I just don’t have the enthusiasm to. I have so many varied interests that it wouldn’t be much fun to ignore some of them in favour of a consistent theme. So instead we’re left with this mishmash of crap.

    I don’t mind that. I really don’t. Since I don’t believe in a revisionist history, i’m happy to leave things as they are, hoping that people will understand that some of my early posts are very naive and clearly immature. I’ve grown beyond all that. This blog is a testament to my journey as an individual.

    Having said all that, I realise that it probably doesn’t make my blog very accessible to the outsider. Also, I find myself wanting to take the blog in new directions now, that simply isn’t going to cut it with the existing categories. Even now, if you look to the right, you’ll see there’s over a hundred posts lumped in ‘Ramblings’. Does that mean I haven’t said much on the other topics at all? No, but unfortunately I tend to ramble in my posts – what? you hadn’t noticed?! – so they tend to cover many categories. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it means that people have to read through a lot to find the one little mention of the topic they’re interested in.

    So, after reading an old post of Lorelle’s, one I’ve read may times before, today i’ve been going back and tagging all my posts to help me get a clearer understanding of what topics i’ve talked about the most. I’ve never used tags so it’s a bit of a pain, but it’s quite telling. Working backwards from the beginning, I can see that ‘videogames’ is clearly the biggest topic, while ‘films’, ‘reviews’ and ‘writing’ are not too far behind. I expect this will change as I get closer to the present day, but it’s encouraging since these are exactly the areas I want to write about now.

    Going forward, my intention is to create top level categories for ‘games reviews’ and ‘film reviews’, since I find myself wanting to write more review type posts these days, particularly on Indie games and games made by the AGS community. That said, I don’t want this to become just a review blog (although I do want to build up a lot of content in this area), so i’m having a good think about the other categories. My choices at the moment are just too generic to be useful. In future, i’ll try to be more focused in my posts too.

    I also want to create a projects page for all the on-going little things i’m dabbling with. There are sometimes long periods of inactivity on the blog when in reality i’ve been doing coursework or learning a new piece of software. My newest interest is Adventure Game Studio, and it would be good to have a place to put up all my future creations, as well as some of my older stuff from other programs. This would also be where I can put up my writing.

    Finally, I really do want to add a Cowboy Bebop section. I’ve had it mapped out for a few months and i’ve even drafted some of the content, but until I finish the new theme, I don’t see the sense in putting it up. There are a lot of fantastic CB fansites out there already, and i’d like to be able to link to them from here. In fact, i’ve got so many good links in all my areas of interest, that they really need their own Links section. There’s just too many for the main blog sidebar.

    I’m still settling in to my ‘new’ computer, so progress on all my projects (including the WP theme) has been slow. But things are moving forward now, and I hope I can implement some of my ideas very soon.

    [ Posted by your humble author Rambo @ 8:24 pm ]