Wine Play Windows Games On Mac

/ Comments off

How to play PC games on a Mac. Windows in macOS. Wine can be hard to get your head around -especially if you want to fully utilise it - and there's no 100 percent guarantee that Wine will work. From my own experience I can confirm that Steam for Windows works great with recent versions of Wine. By this you can run many naitve Windows games available through Steam using Wine or Play On Linux. Issues and games which won't run, or tweaks needed are best being queried from the Wine Application Database.

How To Play Windows Steam Games On Mac With Wine

The Mac has plenty of games, but it'll always get the short end of the stick compared to Windows. If you want to play the latest games on your Mac, you have no choice but to install Windows .. or do you?

There are a few ways you can play Windows games on your Mac without having to dedicate a partition to Boot Camp or giving away vast amounts of hard drive space to a virtual machine app like VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop. Here are a few other options for playing Windows games on your Mac without the hassle or expense of having to install Windows.

GeForce Now

PC gaming on Mac? Yes you can, thanks to Nvidia's GeForce Now. The service allows users to play PC games from Steam or Battle.net on macOS devices. Better still, the graphic power of these games resides on Nvidia's servers. The biggest drawback: the service remains in beta, and there's been no announcement when the first full release is coming or what a monthly subscription will cost.

For now, at least, the service is free to try and enjoy. All supported GeForce NOW titles work on Macs, and yes, there are plenty of them already available!

The Wine Project

The Mac isn't the only computer whose users have wanted to run software designed for Windows. More than 20 years ago, a project was started to enable Windows software to work on POSIX-compliant operating systems like Linux. It's called The Wine Project, and the effort continues to this day. OS X is POSIX-compliant, too (it's Unix underneath all of Apple's gleam, after all), so Wine will run on the Mac also.

Wine is a recursive acronym that stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator. It's been around the Unix world for a very long time, and because OS X is a Unix-based operating system, it works on the Mac too.

Download

As the name suggests, Wine isn't an emulator. The easiest way to think about it is as a compatibility layer that translates Windows Application Programming Interface (API) calls into something that the Mac can understand. So when a game says 'draw a square on the screen,' the Mac does what it's told.

You can use straight-up Wine if you're technically minded. It isn't for the faint of heart, although there are instructions online, and some kind souls have set up tutorials, which you can find using Google. Wine doesn't work with all games, so your best bet is for you to start searching for which games you'd like to play and whether anyone has instructions to get it working on the Mac using Wine.

Note: At the time of this writing, The Wine Project does not support macOS 10.15 Catalina.

CrossOver Mac

Play Windows Games On Mac

CodeWeavers took some of the sting out of Wine by making a Wine-derived app called CrossOver Mac. CrossOver Mac is Wine with specialized Mac support. Like Wine, it's a Windows compatibility layer for the Mac that enables some games to run.

Wine Play Windows Games On Mac 2017

CodeWeavers has modified the source code to Wine, made some improvements to configuration to make it easier, and provided support for their product, so you shouldn't be out in the cold if you have trouble getting things to run.

My experience with CrossOver — like Wine — is somewhat hit or miss. Its list of actual supported games is pretty small. Many other unsupported games do, in fact work — the CrossOver community has many notes about what to do or how to get them to work, which are referenced by the installation program. Still, if you're more comfortable with an app that's supported by a company, CrossOver may be worth a try. What's more, a free trial is available for download, so you won't be on the hook to pay anything to give it a shot.

Boxer

If you're an old-school gamer and have a hankering to play DOS-based PC games on your Mac, you may have good luck with Boxer. Boxer is a straight-up emulator designed especially for the Mac, which makes it possible to run DOS games without having to do any configuring, installing extra software, or messing around in the Mac Terminal app.

With Boxer, you can drag and drop CD-ROMs (or disk images) from the DOS games you'd like to play. It also wraps them into self-contained 'game boxes' to make them easy to play in the future and gives you a clean interface to find the games you have installed.

Boxer is built using DOSBox, a DOS emulation project that gets a lot of use over at GOG.com, a commercial game download service that houses hundreds of older PC games that work with the Mac. So if you've ever downloaded a GOG.com game that works using DOSBox, you'll have a basic idea of what to expect.

Feb 21, 2003  Maelstrom X 3.0.6 - Popular asteroids shooting game. Download the latest versions of the best Mac apps at safe and trusted MacUpdate. Maelstrom is a video game developed by Andrew Welch, released as shareware in November 1992 for Mac OS. The game is an enhanced clone of Atari, Inc.' S 1979 Asteroids arcade game with a visual style similar to the Atari Games 1987 sequel, Blasteroids. You pilot your ship through the dreaded 'Maelstrom' asteroid belt-suddenly your best friend thrusts towards you and fires, directly at your cockpit. You raise your shields just in time, and the battle is joined. The deadliest stretch of space known to mankind has just gotten deadlier. Maelstrom asteroid game mac. Jul 04, 2009  Download Maelstrom (Game) for Windows, Linux, Mac for Free Classic games are awesome and while some fade into the vast dark reaches of lost memory, there are some that stand the test of time. Maelstrom stands the test of time and then some.

Some final thoughts

Wine Play Windows Games On Mac Pc

In the end, programs like the ones listed above aren't the most reliable way to play Windows games on your Mac, but they do give you an option.

Of course, another option is to run Windows on your Mac, via BootCamp or a virtual machine, which takes a little know-how and a lot of memory space on your Mac's hard drive.

How do you play your Windows games on Mac?

Let us know in the comment below!

Mac

Updated October 2019: Updated with the best options.

Wine Play Windows Games On Mac Pro

We may earn a commission for purchases using our links. Learn more.

Concepts everywhere

Another day, another iPhone 12 Pro concept. How much would you pay?

Run Windows Game On Mac

If reports are accurate we might be waiting a little while longer than normal for iPhone 12 Pro. But would you care if it looked like this?