Machinarium

What works

Everything:

• Installing the game.
• Starting the game up.
• Navigating in-game menus, starting up a new game, saving/loading games.
• Actual game play.

What does not

Game window fails to refresh itself when run in fullscreen mode. There's workaround for this, read APPDB howto section for details.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Hadn't played the game from start to the end while doing this tests. Testing game session lasted for about 10 minutes and there were no major problems spotted whatsoever during this run.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Game was tested on computer with following specs: AMD FX 8120 CPU @3.1GHz, 8GB DDR3 RAM, GeForce GTX 550 Ti GPU with 1GB VRAM, nVIDIA Binary Driver v.275.09.07. This game works almost perfectly and should be awarded "Platinum" rating as soon as the "graphics are non refreshing when the game is running at fullscreen mode" bug would be addressed.

It is no longer required to disable hardware acceleration in Adobe Flash Player in order to prevent game crashing to desktop in case recent enough version of Wine is used. It is known that the Adobe Flash Player 10 (and, thus, Machinarium) works pretty well under Wine 1.5.2, with only severe problem being problems with non-refreshing window contents when run in fullscreen mode. Latter one might be pretty easily workarounded by playing the game in windowed mode. Switching off fullscreen mode might be somewhat tricky, read on a section below for details about how to do it.

Getting the game to work with older versions of Wine (1.3.x)

Main problem running Machinarium under Wine is that this game is based on Adobe Flash Player 10 and this piece of software is incompatible with older versions of Wine if the hardware graphics acceleration is enabled. Unfortunately there are no known easy ways to disable Flash Player HW GPU acceleration under Wine using only Wine, so one have to find some other ways to accomplish the task.
Update from 2012/06/04: there's a way to do it using Wine only which inflicts installing some third-party software into the prefix, namely Firefox and Adobe Flash 10 plugin, read more details below.

One possibility is to use pre-configured settings file for Adobe Flash Player with GPU acceleration disabled that had been taken from the Windows-based PC. Example of such settings file had been attached to the bug report #25533 in Wine's Bugzilla. To use this file one should place it under wine prefix in question to the "%USERPROFILE%\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player\macromedia.com\support\flashplayer\sys\" path. For example, if your user name is "user", then most probably correct path would be: "/home/user/.wine/drive_c/users/user/Application Data/Macromedia/Flash Player/macromedia.com/support/flashplayer/sys/".

Having the Flash Player GPU acceleration disabled Machinarium should be running perfectly and offering a decent level of gameplay.

Update from 2012/06/04:
Same effect could be achived with help of Mozilla Firefox.
Here's how to do it:

1. Download and install into your Wine prefix Windows build of Mozilla Firefox. It could be fetched from here: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all.html. You may have to install vcrun2003, vcrun2005 or vcrun2008 (depending on the Firefox version and build) for Firefox to work properly. For official Firefox 12 build installing vcrun2005 is required.
2. Download and install into your prefix Adobe Flash Player version from 10.0.x.x series. It could be fetched from "Archived Flash Player Releases for Developers" page on Adobe website here.
3. Apply workaround for bug 17273 from comment #11.
4. Start up Firefox you had previously installed into your prefix and navigate to Youtube. Try to playback any of the clips but do not switch into fullscreen mode. While clip is playing right click on movie and select "Properties..." in popup menu. There would be Adobe Flash Player specific dialog box displayed with several tabs in it. You have to select first tab ("Display") and unckeck "Hardware acceleration" checkbox there.
5. PROFIT!!! Machinarium now should work properly without hanging upon starting up and switching into fullscreen mode.

Instructions above had been tested and proven to work with Wine 1.3.28. They are likely to work with earier (and later) versions of Wine as well.

Switching the game into windowed mode when playing under Wine 1.5.2+

As of Wine 1.5.2 the game no longer crashes to desktop when run with Adobe Flash Player hardware graphics acceleration turned on. However there are some problems with it - looks like that for some obscure reason Adobe Flash fails to update the game window when run at fullscreen mode. On the other hand, window contents get updated it there's another window is displayed/moved right above it. This specific behavior can be used as kind-a workaround helping to switch the game into windowed mode.

Do as follows:

1. Start up the game. You would get a fullscreen window displaying "Amanita Design" logo, and then it would stall "all black", but you'd be able to hear that the game itself isn't hanged as there would be "sound reactions" to the mouse cursor moves over the center of the game window.
2. Alt+Tab from the game into another app, or use common desktop environment hotkeys combinations like Alt+F1 or Alt+F2 to switch from the game into some other window. IMO Alt+F2 works best for this case as it presents user with a dialog box which might be used on a later steps.
3. Start up any "small" application you like (for example, calculator; alternatively you may use the ALT+F2 dialog box window) and move its window over the non-refreshing game window. You would notice that as long as you do moves - contents of the game window are being updated.
4. Using the "move other window over the game window trick" locate the "Machinarium" title that's being displayed at the center of the game window and click on it. Using the same technique you would reveal that the game now displays it's "Main Menu" screen, where you'd be easily able to find the option to switch the fullscreen mode off (look at the bottom center part of the game window).

P.S. Another way to workaround this bug is by turning off Adobe Flash Player hardware acceleration for fullscreen windows. How to do it is describe in previous section of this howto.