Mar 28, 2020 Steven Marx has been playing games on the Macintosh since his brother brought home a used Mac 512k in 1986. He has been reviewing and writing about Mac games for over ten years, including for Inside Mac Games, MacNN and currently at Mac Gamer HQ where he. Explore games for macOS with local multiplayer on itch.io Find games for macOS with local multiplayer like Streets of Rogue, Nonsense Soccer, Last Man Standing, Invisigun Reloaded, Guardian Sphere on itch.io, the indie game hosting marketplace.
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.
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
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.
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.
Some final thoughts
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!
Updated October 2019: Updated with the best options.
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Windows on Mac Q&A - Revised March 22, 2010
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Can you install and play Windows games directly in MacOS X without installing Windows?
For maximum performance, the best way to play Windows games on an Intel-based Mac is to install Apple Boot Camp, install Windows, and then boot into Windows to play Windows games. However, Parallels Desktop for Mac 3.0 (and higher) supports DirectX and OpenGL and a number of games have been tested and found to work, VMWare Fusion 1.1 (and higher) supports 'select games' and CodeWeavers Crossover Mac supports some games as well.
There also is the long gone TransGaming's Cider which the company refered to as a 'Mac portability engine' that made it possible for game developers to 'encapsulate the original source code' of a Windows game. In turn, a Mac user would then be able to install and run the 'encapsulated' game within MacOS X.
TransGaming further explains that:
Cider is a sophisticated portability engine that allows Windows games to be run on Intel Macs without any modifications to the original game source code. Cider works by directly loading a Windows program into memory on an Intel-Mac and linking it to an optimized version of the Win32 APIs. Games are simply wrapped up in the Cider engine and they work on the Mac. This means developers only have one code base to maintain while keeping the ability to target multiple platforms. Cider powered games use the same copy protection, lobbies, game matching and connectivity as the original.
Cider is based on WINE like CrossOver Mac although Cider is specifically 'targeted at game developers and publishers' rather than end users.
In 2006, MacWorld published an interview with Vikas Gupta, the CEO of TransGaming, who made a number of bold promises about Cider's abilities. The full piece is well worth reading, but in particular Gupta claimed that 'Cider games [would] run as if they were made for Mac OS X' and 'the average user won’t be able to discern any difference'. On the other hand, the interviewer was able to extract that 'users are bound to see 10 to 15 percent lower frame rates than they would in a truly native game.'
Cider sounds great, but so does Cedega, TransGaming's Windows 'portability engine' for Linux that the company claims 'delivers an amazing gaming experience that matches the Windows experience'. However, from reading through a couple of Slashdot postings about Cider and Cedega, it is safe to say that opinion is decidedly mixed.
An article on Linux.com provides more insight into the performance of Cedega, which the author refers to as a 'melding of Wine and DirectX'. The complete article should be read for the full perspective provided by the author, but in particular, referring to Civilization 4 (an 'officially supported' game), the author reports that:
I haven't been able to play Civ4 under Cedega; the menus worked great, the intro movie as well, but as soon as it is finished loading a scenario or a quick game -- crash, boom, bang.
The author also says:
For older games, sometimes Wine alone is a better option. . . Generally speaking, games do work with Cedega, but most of the time (even for officially supported games) you should stay away from 'high' details, and expect crashes.
He ultimately concludes:
Cedega may not be the answer to games under Linux, but it's better than not being able to play at all, until gaming companies notice Linux users as a market and release games for Linux. The sad part is that even as an intermediate solution, Cedega is still more like 'plug and pray' than 'plug and play.'
Since August 3, 2006, when Cider was introduced, a number of games have been ported to the Mac via Cider and review and commentary has been somewhat divided.
Generally, Mac users using Intel-based Macs have been pleased to have more games available and find the performance acceptable, but as performance running any Windows game 'inside' MacOS X -- regardless of method -- will always be at least modestly inferior to that of the native Windows experience, many comment that -- at least for 'serious' gaming -- they prefer to use the Windows version of the game via Boot Camp.
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