Play Windows Games On Mac Catalina

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.

Many of those classics were Mac native games that will never be updated to Catalina but you can now play Windows versions with CrossOver 19 and remarkably most have full controller support and work with better performance than ever.

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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Fishing time

C.J.'s next Fishing Tourney will be in July

There are four Fishing Tourneys each year in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Here's when they are and what the rules are for participating.

Thursday 7 November 2019 at 10:09

More than 25 free casual games added, mainly for POL/POM v4.3.4, but some are OK with POL v4.2.12
Most these games are downloadable automatically by the scripts.

Note: latests scripts added and modified are listed in this area (Application tests) of the forum.

Dadu042

Tuesday 15 October 2019 at 10:45

Warning: PlayOnMac does not work with macOS Catalina (v10.15) and next, because it drop 32bits support.

A new wine builder

We have rewritten from scratch our winebuild platform. To make it short, it is more reliable, more transparent, easier to setup and cross-platform compatible. Any project that needs to use wine could now potentially use it and take advantage of the 1828 different builds. (We admit that some of them are outdated, though).

The winebuild project is open source, uses containers. You can install it on your machine in no time if you want to build wine by yourself.

Support of new wine distributions

Speaking about wine builds, we now support 4 wine distributions:

Upstream wine builds are vanilla and unmodified wine ⁽¹⁾
Staging wine builds are the wine builds patched by wine-staging
Dos support wine builds contains wine and dosbox. (See the next feature)
CX contains a wine version patched by codeweavers

We plan to support proton in the next weeks.

All these wine build can be compiled directly through https://github.com/PhoenicisOrg/phoenicis-winebuild/.

(1) Except the very old versions that have a specific suffix is their names, like 1.5.3-heap_allocation_v2-avoid_deadlock, but we are going to move them anyway.

DOS Support

Winebuild now provides dos_support distribution. The way these wine binaries works is very simple: Wine launch script has been modified to detect if the given .exe is Win32 or a DOS executable. If it is a DOS executable, it will set-up a dosbox configuration that will behave consistenly with wine:

mount drive_c as C: on dosbox
if a autoexec.bat file exists inside the prefix, it will run it
support of custom DOS configuration per prefix
...

The script framework has also been modified so that you can tweak some dosbox settings directly from a script. Here is an exemple of 'advanced' script

GoG support

We've added a way to add a web browser view directly inside script wizards. Thanks to this feature, scripts can now authenticate to any website.

Phoenicis can automatically download and install GoG games from your account, as POLv4 used to do during the past years.

A complete demonstration video of gog.com support: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fopp-x9Fz3g&feature=youtu.be

Also, we have made a script pattern for all GoG games: it has drastically simplified them from POLv4. The script are so much easier that we believe that they will be a lot more maintained.

POLv5 script

POLv4 script

We are planning to add tons of GoG games in the library so stay tuned!

Installation of verbs directly inside a container

You can now install verbs directly from a wine container.

Standalone packages

We are now providing standalone packages that can work on any distribution without the need to install JDK runtime. These packages also remove all the feature that we don't need from the JDK. In the future, there will be probably two sorts of packages, but we want to make things easier for you for now.
We now provide macOS packages
We also support flatpak

I'd like to thank once again all the developers that helped us during the past weeks, plata, madoar, and also all those of you that contributed by reporting bugs, suggesting improvements, or tested phoenicis-winebuild.

Our next goals is to focus on prefix management (change of wine version inside a prefix, add debugging tools, etc...) and performance optimization.

If you have any suggestion or encounter any bug, we encourage you to come in our Github page: https://github.com/PhoenicisOrg/. This version is still at alpha-stage, so please be indulgent.

I also take the opportunity of this news to also announce you that PlayOnLinux and PlayOnMac 4.3.4 has been released. They have been updated to support the new winebuild system, and the different windows of the application have been made resizable. It should fix the HDPI issues some of you were encoutering. We continue to maintain these versions until you are 100% satisfied with POLv5

Download packages:

Linux standalone .tar.gz:http://repository.playonlinux.com/PlayOnLinux/5.0-alpha-2/Phoenicis_5.0-alpha-2-amd64.tar.gz
Linux standalone .deb:http://repository.playonlinux.com/PlayOnLinux/5.0-alpha-2/Phoenicis_5.0-alpha-2-amd64.deb
macOS .dmg:http://repository.playonlinux.com/PlayOnMac/PlayOnMac_5.0-alpha-2.dmg

Stay tuned, the best is yet to come!

Tuesday 27 November 2018 at 0:16

Hi everyone,

Just a short news to announce that we have updated our wine build environement. If you are experiencing issues with our current wine builds (freetype problems, windows too small, ...), this piece of information may interest you.

Pursuing the work concerning the decentralization of our services, we have released a tool than can compile any version of wine directly on your computer or on your server: https://github.com/PhoenicisOrg/phoenicis-winebuild

What are the advantage of this new tool?

You can easily use this tool to compile wine from and for any OS (linux and macOS are supported so far, but we also plan to support freebsd).
We continue to host wine binaries but in a more standard format than before (.tar.gz archives instead of .pol files).
We now provide JSON web services in case you want to have access to the list of the builds:
You can track on wine building status: https://www.playonlinux.com/wine/. A JSON web service is also being released.
Linux users: Full wine staging support (GTK 3.0 is now fully supported for example)
OSX users: 64bit builds are now fully operational.

So what do I have to do if I have problems with the old builds?

Because they are compiled with more up-to-date dependencies, we are expecting the new builds to work better on recent distributions. This should fix most of the problems that you have reported to us recently.

Play Windows Games On Mac Catalina Free

However, we are rebuilding the old packages one by one and it takes time. We advise you to follow the build status here to ensure that the versions you are using are rebuilt: https://www.playonlinux.com/wine/. Then, uninstall your current wine versions from POL and reinstalling them should fix the problem you are encoutering.

As you may have noticed, POL / POM 4 have already been updated to use this new format. If you are using 4.3+, you are good to go

Roadmap

We plan to mirror all the builds in / near the United States
We will probably provide a web interface so that you can request for custom builds with custom patches. This web interface shall be open source so that you can host it where you want.

Links

Source of the new wine build service: https://github.com/PhoenicisOrg/phoenicis-winebuild
Link to the build queue: https://www.playonlinux.com/wine/

Sunday 23 September 2018 at 21:48

Hi everybody,

I'm aware that it has been a while since the last time we gave news to you. Be reassured, the project is moving on and here we are to give you some news.

Today, I am very proud to announce that we have managed to release the alpha version of PlayOnLinux and PlayOnMac 5 (aka Phoenicis). I would like to give my special thanks to those who have continued the work I started few years ago: @plata and @madoar, and many others.

You can download the binaries here: https://repository.playonlinux.com/PlayOnLinux/5.0.0-alpha1

So, what's new?

In one word: everything. First, the interface has been completely redesigned:

Phoenicis is a completely rewritten piece of software that aims to bring you all the features of PlayOnLinux 3 and 4 (a.k.a Arietis) with new principles:

The platform is decentralized, meaning that the program will continue working if our website encounters problems. We have chosen to store the scripts on a git repository (https://github.com/PhoenicisOrg/scripts) so that it becomes more respectful of open source principles.
The script engine is an important ingredient that made PlayOnLinux so successful in the past. This is why we want to improve it. We need it to be more accessible to everyone. For that matter, it has been completely redesigned. We decided to get rid of bash in favor of Javascript.

This alpha version respects theses principles and supports about 135 games and many other apps. You can see the whole list here: https://www.phoenicis.org/apps

Get involved

We need to go further and find a way to gather your feedback. This is the reason why we are releasing an alpha-test version of Phoencis.

If you encounter any issue or want to share an idea to improve the app, you can use our GitHub page: https://github.com/PhoenicisOrg/phoenicis/issues
If you want to improve Phoencis, feel free to fork the repository and send your pull requet
If you want to add / update a script, you can check this repository: https://github.com/PhoenicisOrg/scripts. If you need, you can even create your own script repository.
If you want to help us translate Phoencis, we are using crowdin: https://crowdin.com/project/phoenicis

What's next?

The project is far from being finished. Our next steps are to develop a strong Wine build platform using modern virtualization and/or containerization solutions. Then, we will make a new website (hosted at: http://www.phoenicis.org) so that we can continue giving you the best support we can.

Feel free to send feedbacks and see you soon

Thursday 8 February 2018 at 5:30

Hi everyone,

In these early 2018, a new feature is available for all scriptwriters that should make user experience more enoyable. Until today, the settings for the wine virtual desktop was hard coded in the script. Two users have therefore proposed a new script allowing scriptwriters to ask the user for these settings.

This script is currently in testing to ensure that it works properly but will be validated soon. We invite scriptwriters to replace Set_Desktop by a call to the new script like that :

Thanks to lahtis and LinuxScripter ^^

In addition, some of you may have experienced problems with the Microsoft font installation. The script has been updated and the problem should be fixed. If you've used it recently and have problems with the fonts, you can try to reinstall them via the configuration menu ;)

Enjoy!

Play Windows Games On Mac Catalina 2017

Sunday 25 December 2016 at 23:15

Hi everyone!

We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

We are aware that we did not give a lot of news this year and we are verry sorry for that. However, we are coming in 2017 with a lot of new stuff.

We are proud to annouce that we have a first working version of PlayOnLinux 5 with a strong architecture. You'll hear about this very soon. To keep you patienting, here is a small video:

Sunday 3 January 2016 at 16:14

PlayOnLinux and PlayOnMac 4.2.10 are now released. Here is the changelog:

Wine 1.8 staging is now the default wine version on OSX. The build process has been improved thanks to wine-staging team so that the compiler supports ms_hook_prologue, allowing function hotpatching. This should improve the compatibility of some applications like Steam.
Some wine staging instructions have been added so that they are fully supported by the scripts.
The wineprefix tab in the configuration panel has been improved.

Enjoy!

Wednesday 13 May 2015 at 17:28

Development has been picking up steam lately, and as such, we are proud to release PlayOnLinux & PlayOnMac 4.2.8. You can download it here:

Here is the changelog for this release:

Crossover Games

Feature freeze has been declared for POL 4.x, so this changelog should contain only bug fixes
checkVersionUse(): don't assume cfg files have any order
manual installation: component installation bugfix ($IFS not restored correctly)
POL_OpenShell: call POL_Wine_AutoSetVersionEnv in all cases, to set $PATH (#5062)
Fix consecutive shortcut creations
POL_Wine_SetVideoDriver bugfix, device IDs were not inserted as DWORDs

Mac Games For Catalina

Enjoy!