Back in the 90s I had this game on Mac, so I'd like to know whether GOG has any plans to continue this legacy and give us a version for modern Macs too?

Hello, super late reply, but perhaps it is still helpful either to you or someone else.

The game runs fine in DOSBox. I just played it. Even when GOG does not offer some games for MacOS, you usually can get them to run with either DOSBox, ScummVM or Wine. That is what GOG is using themselves as well. It is useful to have a little knowledge about these programs anyway, because sometimes these settings have to be changed for different computers.

So here is what you can do to get it to run. Just ask if any of my instructions are unclear to you.

Step 1: Extracting the game setup
If you buy and download the game you can download a Windows setup executable. It is basically an archive containing all the files of the setup and the game itself. You need a way to extract them. The app Keka seems to be supporting extracting .exe files.

Step 2: Moving the game files
After you extracted the executable you need to locate the game files. Fortunately there are not many. Its only HD.HPF and EXPRESS.EXE. And there is a directory named data, which contains CD1.HPF, CD2.HPF and CD3.HPF.
Create a directory The Last Express somewhere on your computer and inside a directory called Game. Move the game files into the directory Game.

Step 3: Download DOSBox
Download DOSBox and move the application into the previously created directory The Last Express. The DOSBox application can reside anywhere on your hard drive but moving it into this folder makes managing paths way easier. And I assume that you placed the application there.

Step 4: Create a configuration file for DOSBox
A configuration file is used to configure DOSBox. Most games run out of the box, but some need some settings changed. The default configuration provided by GOG did not work for me. So I edited it. I uploaded the configuration file DOSBox.conf to Google Drive for you to download. Place it in the directory The Last Express as well.

If you want to create it yourself just create a plain text file named DOSBox.conf and place it into The Last Express directory right next to the DOSBox application. Because of the name of the file and it residing in the same directory as DOSBox, DOSBox will access it automatically. Settings not provided by this configuration file will be read from the default configuration file for DOSBox. This one resides somewhere else, but don't worry about it. The settings I changed were the following:

[sdl]
fullscreen=true
fulldouble=false
fullresolution=original
windowresolution=original
output=opengl

[dosbox]
memsize=31

[render]
aspect=true
scaler=none

[cpu]
core=auto
cputype=auto
cycles=fixed 60000
cycleup=1000
cycledown=1000

[autoexec]
mount C "Game/"
mount D "Game/data/" -t cdrom
C:
EXPRESS.EXE
exit

Step 5: Start the game

The directory should now look like this:

The Last Express
--- Game
--- --- data
--- --- --- CD1.HPF
--- --- --- CD2.HPF
--- --- --- CD3.HPF
--- --- EXPRESS.EXE
--- --- HD.HPF
--- DOSBox.app
--- DOSBox.conf

Doubleclick DOSBox.app to start the game. Notice that you perhaps do not see the extension .app depending on your finder settings. In this case the application is just called DOSBox.

I hope that this works for you :)

Thanks for your reply and the tips. I'm not a very technologically competent person, and I've never used DosBox before ... But I did discover a program called "Crossover" which lets you run some Windows applications on a Mac. I'll see if perhaps any of your tips could help me run Last Express in "Crossover"...

It'd still be great if the GOG team could come out with a dedicated Mac version though, for all of us whose first language isn't computer programming :P

If your visuals are looking greenish when playing The Last Express try to set output=opengl in the [sdl] section of the DOSBox configuration file.

Crossover is basically an app for managing applications run with Wine. And because GOG uses DOSBox to run The Last Express, Wine will in turn just run DOSBox. So basically its Crossover > Wine > DOSBox.

Because of this it might be sometimes hard to track down a problem, but if your game is already running and you encounter problems within the game, your best bet might be to modify the in-game settings or the DOSBox configuration file.

I encountered the problem with the greenish colored visuals and setting the above mentioned option fixed it. Also if your CPU fan starts spinning and heating up running the game, change cycles=max or cycles=auto to cycles=fixed 77000 in the [cpu] section. If DOSBox is running a game with cycles=max (the value auto can also do that) it uses all the remaining capacity (of the first core) your CPU has, causing the game either to run too fast or unstable and also causing high CPU load. And most of the time the game runs just fine with lower cycles, meaning less work for your CPU.

Deciding on the number of cycles I just take a look at the system requirements for the game and the year released. For example The Last Express required at least a 66 MHz processor. Which is roughly equivalent to 26800 cycles (according to Performance - DOSBoxWiki). But it was released in 1997 so I guess that most players had a newer processor like a Pentium 100 (running with 100 MHz). The cycles equivalent listed on that page are 77000 so I went with that. The game runs smoothly now, without my fan spinning or CPU heating up like they did before.
I don't know whether this is an accurate way of deciding on the cycles used, but so far it worked out fine for me.

Hope this helps :)

gross