S&M Penal Zone Demo For the Mac
 

Hey guys, I tried playing the demo version of Sam and Max: The Penal Zone, but the graphics move really slowly, to the point where its just frame by frame. The music isn't much better, and it stops and starts in sync with the graphics. The speech, however, runs perfectly, and the graphics and music are at their worst with the fully detailed scenes over the city and in the spaceship. The scenes with the Twilight Zone guy run fluidly. Are there any updates for my Mac I can get to fix this, or maybe I should defrag it?
queen_of_the_lobsters

I bought the thing and have the exact same problem with it. I think if Telltale can't manage to make decent Mac versions of the games they just shouldn't relese them in Mac OS
I'm going to ask for my money back, the game is unplayable.

What graphics chips do you have?
Have you tried setting graphics quality to 1?

Chipset Model: GMA X3100
Type: Display
Bus: Built-In
VRAM (Total): 144 MB
Vendor: Intel (0x8086)
Device ID: 0x2a02
Revision ID: 0x0003
Displays:
Color LCD:
Resolution: 1024 x 768
Depth: 32-Bit Color
Core Image: Hardware Accelerated
Main Display: Yes
Mirror: Off
Online: Yes
Quartz Extreme: Supported
Built-In: Yes
Stretched: Yes

And I don't believe I have tried setting graphics quality to 1. How do you do that?

I don't have this in front of me, so I may have some details wrong.

Go to Settings in the main menu.

Click the right arrow until you get to Graphics.

There should be a Graphics Quality setting. I think the default is 5.

There's also resolution, which you could try turning down.

You're probably not going to have much luck with a GMA X3100 or any other Intel GPU, even at quality 1. Our system requirements recommend against using a Mac with integrated graphics. Of course you are welcome to try, which is what the demo is for :)

It's possible in the future we may support a wider range of Mac HW (I personally would like to), but for now the GL driver for these integrated cards can't really handle our shaders.

So, what kind of Macs would your games work best with?

Any other Intel Mac that doesn't have the GMA cards. First generation Intel Mac Book (Pros OK), I think the first generation Intel iMacs, and a few others.

At least the current line of Macs from the Mac Book to the Airs don't have integrated/GMA cards.

I have exactly the same problem. The frame rate is just awful! It's very glitchy and jittery. I bought the game off of Steam if that makes a difference.

I have an early 2008 MacBook Pro, 2.4 GHz C2D, 2GB RAM, 256 MB 8600M GT discrete graphics chip. Mac OS 10.6.3

The audio sometimes gets stuck in a loop, but is usually fine. Switching to windowed mode helped a bit, but not much, and setting graphics settings to 1 while in windowed mode made it almost bearable during cutscenes, but any time there is free world exploration the mouse pointer will barely follow my movements.

I hope this is fixed relatively soon, because I really look forward to being able to play these games on my Mac!