I have installed the GOG package of Arcanum in a vista bottle in CrossOver Games 7.2.0 on OS X 10.5.8. I tried a vista bottle because xp didn't work. When I started it up, I'd get the main menu, but the mouse wouldn't respond.
I started searching for solutions.
First I found out how to run it in a window. That didn't fix it.
Then I found links to patches and [url=http://www.shsforums.net/topic/33528-arcanum-unofficial-patch-extras/?s=939c72e7377917b07e022f028f7ead5b]here and installed them in the recommended order. Those didn't fix it.
Then I read some instructions at the CrossOver forums. I learned about safe mode. That didn't fix it either.
So right now, I have all the patches (except the shadows fix, because there is no arcanum.cfg in the GOG installation under CrossOver), and I have the command-line flags -window -no3d -doublebuffer. None of these things have helped. The closest I got was the intro logo animations and the intro sequence with the armour-clad guy bringing a sword to a gunfight, followed by the menu (very broken, squares missing and the graphics from those squares moved elsewhere on the screen). The mouse still didn't respond.
Has anyone else gotten it to run on mac from the GOG package? I read of success installing from the original discs, but I don't have those. I could obtain them through shady channels, but I'd rather just use this package, if I can get it to work. I would be willing to install it under VMWare Fusion or VirtualBox or something, but I'd prefer not to, since that requires me to allocate lots of hard drive space to a Windows disk image. I would use my BootCamp partition in VMWare Fusion, but it got hit by the WGA update which pretty much killed it for me, and I'm too lazy to fix it. And I'd rather not have to wait for Windows to boot up inside a VM in order for me to play a game. That's a lot of unnecessary overhead for such an old game.
Thank you for the help I've gleaned so far. :D

So judging by the lack of responses, I'm going to assume nobody has an answer for me. I'll see if anyone at the crossover forums has any knowledge of how to make this work. If not, I guess I'll just grab the original game disc iso files someplace and do it that way.
Thanks.

Well, I tried running it under wine1.2
That worked, but it had some serious graphics issues.
This was unpatched.
Have you tried running the game, freshly installed, without any patches installed?
Do you get anything printed to std.err?

I can say it works nicely, with little audio problems, under Virtual Box, OS X 10.6.4 Host, Windows 7 Guest, no hardware acceleration (i don't even know if the game uses it, however being the support for Win7 still buggy, i haven't installed it yet).

However, after installing the widescreen patch, the game stopped working and i had to undo it.