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1. How to play Mac games

How to play Mac games

Macintosh emulation is quite hard to achieve, you'll have to try and fail a lot, and do a lot of research.

About 1000 Mac games are available on MyAbandonware, from 1980 to 2005. You will need one of these softwares to play them:

• SheepShaver: games from mid 90s to 2005 (MacOS 8.1 to 9.0.4), follow the download links to the precompiled binaries, made available on E-Maculation forums ;
• Basilisk II: games from 1991 to 1996 (MacOS 7 to 8.1), follow the download links to the precompiled binaries, made available on E-Maculation forums ;
• Mini vMac: games from the 80s, although some games were still made for the emulated Mac in th early 90s.

Many old games will work fine in a SheepShaver or Basilisk II, you should only install and configure one emulator first and to run the game in it.

Complete guides for Mac emulation

Making Mac games work is quite complicated compared to DOS games. You'll have to find a Mac computer ROM to emulate a Mac computer. These ROM files are quite annoying to get, you can extract one from a working Mac, or get one for vMac here (archived), or several one with this guide at Redundant Robot. You should then follow these guides:

Play Classic Windows Games On Mac Steam

• SheepShaver: setup guide on Windows, Mac or Linux ;
• Basilisk II: setup guide on Windows, Mac or Linux ;
• Mini vMac: setup guide on Windows.

Mac emulation is more complicated than DOS emulation, but the E-Maculation community is very helful, with tons of guides and tutorials in english. You should also read this page from Macintosh Garden.

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?

Play Classic Windows Games On Mac With Gog

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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