Neverwinter Nights Wine

PrimeJunta: After sweating a quite a bit and jumping through some hoops, I finally got NWN 2 to install and run on Wineskin. I haven't played beyond the opening scene so there may be more problems down the line, but I thought I'd share what I did anyway. I won't explain why I jumped through these hoops, except to say that it wasn't for the fun of it. If anyone has better ways of doing this, I'd be delighted to hear about it (except "install on Windows and copy it over" as I don't have a Windows box handy).

Running OS X 10.8.3 on late 2009 27" iMac with Radeon 4850 512 MB.

Engine and wrapper versions needed:

(1) Wrapper: Wineskin-2.5.9
(2) Engines: WS9Wine1.5.28, WS9Wine1.5.27, WS9WineCX12.1.2 (yeah, all three)

So, here's how I did it. YMMV naturally.
(1) Create blank wrapper with engine WS9Wine1.5.27,
(2) Update Winetricks.
(3) Run winetricks vcrun2005
(4) Run winetricks directx9
(5) Run winetricks mono210
(6) Switch to engine WS9WineCX12.1.2
(7) Run the GOG NWN 2 installer. Wait. It will finish uglily with a blank dialog with OK, Abort, Retry buttons that do nothing. Force quit it.
(8) Switch to engine WS9Wine1.5.28
(9) Launch and enjoy.

I'm a bit concerned about the way the installer finished; I'm not sure exactly what the deal is. I suspect it may have to do with .net 3.5 (that's what mono210 substitutes), but the game does start up correctly and I did get to the "So many years ago..." scene.

As an aside, that seems like an amazing amount of work & trouble simply to avoid having to use boot camp to install Windows (since this sort of thing is exactly why Apple provides it.) Not only would it cut the emulation configuration work completely out for you, but think of all of the other games you'd be able to run under their native OS as well-better performance, better reliability, just better all around, certainly. You'd spend a lot less time tinkering and a lot more time playing, that's for sure...;)

People talk about the "hassle" of maintaining two OSes, and I won't disagree because I recall what it was like to maintain even three OSes at a time...;) However, even running two OSes on your Mac has got to be better than continuously hassling with an OS emulator-less work, more fun. Seems a fairly simply equation.