What is Baldur's Gate TuTu?

You will need to have at least one disc from Baldur's Gate II mounted to get past the protection. I suggest BG2: Throne of Bhaal (the expansion of BG2). I think a simple Toast mount will be sufficient, but I burned a disc and just leave it in.

For years, the modding community has kept Baldur's Gate from becoming a forgotten relic in some dungeon - updating, adding content, and improving the experience. This particular version of Baldur's Gate, through the wonders of the Wayback Machine and way too much research, is what is known as BG Easy TuTu - allowing the content of the first game to be enjoyed with the spiffy engine from the second.

Many of the files used to create this have been missing for years, and some still are (compromises were made, conversions were done). Rather than upload the Vanilla version of this, I have added some of the most popular mods to save those interested some time and headaches. Any of these can be removed by clicking on the installers in the BG Tutu folder and following the terminal prompts (hint: read the 'read me' files if you wish to learn more).

ANY TIME A CHANGE IS MADE TO THE MODS IT IS BEST TO START A NEW PLAYTHROUGH.

Tutu was an early attempt to update BG1 - and has been superseded in recent years by Trilogy/Big World style mods and Enhanced Editions. The PPC versions have largely languished, with many folks not even knowing they existed. You will rarely even see them referenced after Wine versions appeared on GOG.

Tutu is not without bugs, and the biggest one concerns creating characters. There has been a consistent 'crash to desktop' issue with the generation of non-multiclassed characters; the only single class characters that do not cause this are barbarians, monks, and magic-users (there may be another, and sometimes if the stars are right - it works as intended). Here are the steps to enjoying BG Tutu:

1) Set your configuration using the BG Configuration program - because I am using this on a relatively beefy G4, I have everything maxed out and set to an 'unsupported' resolution. I highly recommend 3d acceleration, as I found movement very lagging without it on my system. The highest available resolution merely scales the UI to 2x the 800x600, and isn't super attractive - but it does provide a larger area in the play window. Anytime the GUI is stretched it just looks bad to me, I prefer blocking stretched resolutions and dealing with blank space around the interface. There are widescreen mods for TuTu, but I was having a difficult time getting them to look proper. With the current install order of mods, one could be added. Unfortunately, restoring the GUI to the blue stone on PPC Macs is rather tricky - those particular mods are lost to the sands of time. I am working on porting a PC version to PPC, but I'm not quite there.

2) To make a character, use the non-highlighted OS X version of the launcher (it contains 'osx' in the description, unlike the other) - it will be wonky when it comes up (for those interested this is a patched version of the base SOA launcher, which doesn't share the TOB launchers issues with character generation).

You will need to click around that somewhat empty first screen to find the path forward. Generate the character using the multiplayer option and rather than starting the game after, EXPORT the character. The escape key and 'back' options are your friends here after finding the magic 'click spot' on the first screen. This is the least finicky of all work arounds for this, eventually I may crack the reason for the CTD flaw. Previously I was able to just replace the baldur.ini with a fresh one and it would work, but the deeper I modded the less this worked. You cannot generate a Wild Mage character without some serious backflips, involving more modified base files than I wish to explain or include with this shared version.

In order to stop a stuttering in movement/audio a slight change needs to be applied to the baldur.ini file. Open in a text editor after applying configuration, and find and replace the following lines:

This:

Low Mem Sounds 1=0
Low Mem Sounds 2=0

Should Become

Low Mem Sounds 1=1
Low Mem Sounds 2=1

3) Boot the highlighted launcher (should be at the top of the folder when sorted by 'kind' - which is how I set it). This is the TOB 2.1.2 launcher, fully patched - and if you want to make a game shortcut, this is the one to use.

4) Go to single player, new game - and rather than generating a character, go to import and select the character made in step 2. Start game. Enjoy.

Download Baldur's Gate TuTu for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: QEMU