Hey all, Kaleb again. A while back I posted the first public alpha of Mac.apk here. Thanks to everyone who tried it and sent bug reports, a lot of fixes came straight out of those.

Today the whole thing is open source: https://github.com/kksimp/Mac.apk

Quick refresher on what it is: Mac.apk runs Android apps and games directly on Apple Silicon. It's not an emulator and there's no VM or Android system running in the background. The game's ARM code runs straight on your Mac's CPU, and graphics go through Metal. Each game installs into your Applications folder as its own app, so it launches from the Dock or Spotlight like any other Mac game.

What's in the repo: everything that makes it work. The Android framework layer, the native runtime, the loader that runs the game's ARM code, and the Mac app itself. There's a build guide if you want to compile it yourself, but you don't have to. The signed and notarized app is still a free download on the Releases page, and there's a new release out today with fixes for Flutter, React Native and Cordova apps and non-Retina monitors.

Where it's at: 65 apps tested by hand so far. 51 work, 10 partly work, and 4 don't run yet. Asphalt Legends, Among Us, Subway Surfers, Crossy Road, Temple Run 2, Plague Inc. and Geometry Dash Lite are on the list. Every app's status is in the compatibility list in the repo.

Being honest about the state of it: it's still alpha. Anything with heavy anti-cheat or Play Integrity checks probably won't work, and in-app purchases don't.

License: AGPL-3.0, so you can read it, change it and share it. Companies that want to ship it in a closed product can get a commercial license from me.

Requirements: macOS 26.4 or newer, any Apple Silicon Mac.

If you try a game, I'd love to hear whether it worked and which Mac you're on. Bug reports are still the most useful thing, and now if you know your way around the code you can send a fix too.

SkyrimMT runs Skyrim Special Edition / Anniversary Edition (Steam) on Apple Silicon Macs and includes a native mod manager.

Setup

• One-click install of Wine, Steam and Skyrim
• Direct3D 11 → Metal (DXMT), SKSE support
• Essentials (SKSE, Address Library, Engine Fixes, SkyUI…) in one click

Mod manager

• FOMOD installs, Nexus browsing, updates and file selection
• Nexus Collections, Wabbajack modlists, Mod Organizer 2 import
• LOOT sorting, ESL flagging, xEdit cleaning
• Data folder view with conflicts per file
• Profiles with instant switching
• Snapshots: restore any earlier setup in one click
• Crash log analysis that tests suspect mods automatically
• Save guard: warns before removing a mod your save uses
• Per-mod performance measurement/benchmark tool
• Native LOOT, Pandora and BodySlide ports

Requirements: Apple Silicon, macOS 13+, Skyrim SE on Steam, ~25 GB free.

GitHub: https://github.com/HorrorPills/skyrimmt
AI was used for development and close curation.

Come on, let's get it running on Mac Silicon too!

We've recently released DSX for Mac 1.1 with the support to update your DualSense and DualSense Edge's firmware directly on your Mac for free in-app. Simply download DSX on your Mac, connect your controller using a usb-c cable, and update!

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dsx-gamepad-companion/id6782121173?mt=12

Hi everyone! This is a follow-up on the development progression of Mullion.

God of War Ragnarok runs on Mullion's Direct3D 12 now! Screenshots are from where my save starts, High preset at 1512x982, no vsync. Mullion sits at 26 to 28 FPS there and D3DMetal 4.0 beta 3 at 29 to 40. Take those with a grain of salt though, the game was still compiling shaders in both runs, so it's a first look and not a benchmark.

Last time a lot of you asked how to run it in CrossOver, so here's how to: Grab mullion-v0.3.tar.gz from the release and double-click it. Then right-click CrossOver in Applications, hit Show Package Contents and go into Contents/SharedSupport/CrossOver/lib, rename the dxmt folder in there to dxmt-original so you have a backup, drop the mullion-v0.3 folder in, rename it to dxmt and set your bottle to DXMT. Your first game will get blocked because macOS can't verify winemetal.so, so click Done, go to System Settings > Privacy & Security, hit Allow Anyway next to winemetal.so and start the game again. CrossOver updates bring back their own DXMT, so after one you just swap the folder again, but this pre-release should not be used for ordinary gaming yet.

On my machine the Black Myth: Wukong benchmark (High, 1512x982, TSR at 100%) does 28 FPS on Mullion and 34 on D3DMetal 4.0 beta 3, and 3DMark Fire Strike scores 7003. D3DMetal is ahead in both games for now. Next up for DX12 is shader model 6.7, D3D11On12 and a Metal 4 backend, plus a lot of performance and reliability work.

Huge thanks to partprogramming09 on GitHub, who sent 18 of the commits in this release, most of them groundwork for M1 and M2, plus pipeline statistics and a pile of D3D12 fixes. Also thanks to u/loolemon for the stream output fixes and for testing it in MetalSharp. None of the M1/M2 work has run on one yet, so for now you still need an M3 or newer, plus macOS 15 or newer. Only 64-bit games go through Mullion, 32-bit ones fall back to Wine's own Direct3D.

If something breaks, open an issue with your Mac, the game and the log. Games that just work help a lot too!

https://github.com/dttdrv/mullion/releases/tag/v0.3

My apolocheese for the phone recording.

Halo 3 now runs on Mac via a Project Reclaimer mac port. You still need Halo 3 MCC on Steam. Multiplayer apparentlty works but I havent tested yet.

It runs smooth-ish on my Macbook Air M1 8gb at 40-60fps. I have a fan pointing at it so it doesnt thermal throttle.

The Mac version of Warband draws with OpenGL, which Apple deprecated years ago, and on Apple Silicon it runs suboptimal. I wrote a replacement renderer that does the drawing with Metal instead.

The demo video runs on MacBook Pro M5 32 GB RAM, purely on battery (thus, small lag during battle start).

• Faster: in a 200 vs 200 battle on a MacBook Pro M5, the average went from 110 fps (at 1512×982) to 199 fps at the screen's full Retina resolution (3024×1964), four times the pixels.
• MetalFX upscaling: the scene can be drawn smaller and enlarged by MetalFX, either spatially or temporally (built from several frames), while the interface stays sharp.
• Optional visual improvements, each with a switch: softer shadows, shadows from characters, ambient occlusion, torch shadows, better highlights and metals, water reflections, skin, wind in trees, HDR output, and more. A preset called "As the game looks" leaves the picture as it was.
• No game files are changed. A small launcher app starts the Steam version with the new renderer loaded. It also has the original launcher's settings (resolution, windowed mode, vsync, language, sound) and lets you pick a module.

The game itself is still an Intel program running under Rosetta 2. Only the graphics have changed, so on very large battles the CPU is still the limit.

Download: https://github.com/MTheProgrammer/mb-warband-apple-metal-renderer/releases/tag/v0.2.0

 The app isn't signed by Apple, so macOS blocks it the first time. Run this once in Terminal:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /path/to/"Warband Metal.app"

It's free and open source. Bug reports with a screenshot are welcome, and the log is in ~/Library/Logs/warband-metal/trace.log.

Primarily of the game was built on my mac book air while I was traveling overseas for the last year

Game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5200620/Dungeonbound/

WARNING: Claude Code used

I got into an argument with some other developers about Android emulators the other day about how all of them that can game really is just using Google's GFXStream in the goldfish Android image to stream graphics out of the VM for MoltenVK to render:

And then I realizes how no one seems to have done a barebone "emulator" outside of Android Emulator to do this, so, here we are, introducing "Mini", a literal implementation of the idea, no other extra fixes or features included: https://github.com/ohaiibuzzle/mini-android-emulator-mac, in theory this is about as good of a graphics implementation as you can get currently, supports up to GLES 3.1 and Vulkan 1.4 apps.

The way this works (because I don't have a powerful enough computer to compile Android) is that it takes Google's Android Emulator images (which is Treble compatible), pulls out just the parts it need, and then throw on just a generic GSI (for reference, this one was used: https://github.com/Kyros70/PixelOS_treble/releases ) and boot the VM with that.

The name "Mini" is because when I wanted to prove this was feasible I called the folder "mini-android-emulator", and then somehow that stuck (lol). Currently testing so no "releases" yet, you'll need to download pre-compiled builds from Actions, or build it yourself.

Have fun!

Sorry if this is a silly question, but I’ve never really been interested in gaming on a Mac before. However, after finding out that the PS4 version of God of War III has been ported to PC, I’d really love to play it.

Does anyone know if there’s a way to get it running on a Mac, even through an emulator or something similar?

I got Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 (the Steam version) running on a base M4 Mac mini with macOS 27. It boots, signs in to Xbox, plays its videos, loads and flies. At Gibraltar it does about 22 fps parked and 19 on the take-off roll, at the Medium preset with FSR Balanced. It runs on the Mac itself, not through cloud streaming.

It runs through Highball 0.10.21 (a free and open source app I work on) on a new engine built for Apple silicon (Wine compiled for arm64, with FEX translating the game's x86-64 code instead of Rosetta).

Performance

Measured on a base M4 Mac mini (10-core GPU, 32 GB) with macOS 27, in a Cessna 172 at Gibraltar, Medium preset with FSR Balanced, in daylight.

I tested on a Mac with 32 GB. If you have an M-series Pro, Max or Ultra, or a 16 or 24 GB Mac, happy to hear your numbers!

How to try it

1. Get Highball 0.10.21 from https://gethighball.com. If you already have Highball, use Check for Updates in the Highball menu, since updates reach existing installs gradually.
2. In Highball, set up Steam and install Flight Simulator 2024 from your library.
3. Press Play, choose "Use the preview engine", then "New environment". Highball downloads the engine (about 420 MB) and sets up an environment with its own Steam, which you sign in to once. The game you installed comes along without a second download or extra disk space.
4. The first launch takes about 13 minutes to reach the cockpit. The game asks you to sign in with a Microsoft account and link it to Steam (the game says that link is permanent). Turn motion blur off in its graphics settings.

Known issues

• It needs macOS 26.5 or later, and I tested on 27.0. I've tested it on a Mac with 32 GB of memory, and smaller Macs haven't been tested enough to say how they do.
• About 22 fps parked, and take-offs can still hitch, especially when one of the game's pop-ups opens.
• Now and then a start crashes while the world loads. Starting again works.
• Some lights and line effects are missing, because Metal has no geometry shaders. Dense cities like New York need more GPU memory than a 32 GB Mac has at Medium.
• Untested so far: other Macs, long flights, controllers and yokes, add-ons, the Microsoft Store version.

What it took

The short version. The full write-up with charts is here: https://gethighball.com/docs/flight-simulator-2024-apple-silicon/

1. On Highball's usual engines (Rosetta + D3DMetal) the game refused to start, because D3DMetal answered Shader Model 6.6 and the game wants 6.7. Getting past that check only led to a crash around frame 40, and the same happened with vkd3d-proton, so it wasn't the graphics layer.
2. So a new engine: Wine built for arm64, FEX translating the x86-64 code, vkd3d-proton and MoltenVK to Metal. macOS 26.5 added what this needs, like 4 KB memory pages for a process.
3. Small test programs checked against real x86-64 Windows (floating-point exceptions, x87, thread contexts, debug registers), with FEX and Wine patched until the answers matched. After that the game got past its crash.
4. FEX turned on x86-style memory ordering only in the first thread of each process. Now every thread has it (a test went from 2.8 million reorderings to none).
5. MoltenVK's own helper commands overwrote descriptor tables that later draws used, which hung the GPU at every screen change.
6. Videos: GStreamer, video frames shared between D3D11 and D3D12 through Metal, and a color bug in Wine's Arm build of FFmpeg.
7. Metal "Internal Errors" from render passes beyond Apple GPUs' size limit, holes in the ground from texture arrays read as 2D, and GPU hangs from lossless compression on a 4K image copied every frame.
8. The game thought it used 609 GB of memory (Wine reported the address space) and kept only 102 MB of textures. Every start converted 2,566 shaders, now it's 2.
9. A sign-in at every launch, from a Keychain lookup that failed.
10. Stutter: the game rewrites small pieces of its own code about 220 times a second, and each rewrite made FEX translate that code again on the main thread. r5 (engine behind 0.10.21) skips writes that change nothing, translates freshly rewritten code in small pieces and reuses old translations.

78 patches in all (Wine 25, FEX 23, MoltenVK 16, vkd3d-proton 7, SPIRV-Cross 4, DXVK 3), in https://github.com/gauthierpiarrette/highball-engine

Credit

This runs on Wine, FEX, vkd3d-proton, DXVK, MoltenVK, SPIRV-Cross and GStreamer. Michael Liendo's teardown in highball-db#6 was the starting point, and Brendan Shanks's notes on Wine for arm64 macOS were the map.

Special thanks to u/Prize_Bell_540 for testing it and providing very valuable feedback on early versions!

Fellowship was the one game I wanted to play on my Mac that I couldn't get running through CrossOver or any of the other usual tools. I finally got it working, anti-cheat and all, so I figured I'd share in case anyone else is in the same boat.

It runs through StonkGuy's fork of FX Steam Launcher, which is the part doing all the hard work. It runs SteamOS in a VM on your Mac, emulates x86 with a patched FEX, and runs the game through Proton with the real Easy Anti-Cheat. Big thanks to StonkGuy for that.

Fellowship needed a few extra things on top of it:

• a newer build of StonkGuy's FEX than the launcher installs (otherwise EAC errors out at launch)
• a fix for the mouse. When you right-click drag to turn the camera, your cursor would end up somewhere other than where the game thought it was, so you'd hover or click the wrong stuff
• a fix for the game freezing the whole VM when you quit or log out

I put the setup, scripts and a short guide here: https://github.com/wkbevill-svg/fellowship-on-mac

Rough steps:

1. Install FX Steam Launcher 1.9-eac.1 from StonkGuy's GitHub
2. Let it set up SteamOS, sign into Steam, and set the graphics path to DXMT
3. Install Fellowship with Proton Experimental and the EAC runtime
4. Run one script to install the newer FEX. It prints your launch options, which you paste into Steam
5. Run another script to patch the launcher (mouse + quit fixes)

On my M3 Max I get around 45-60 fps in town with render scale at 0.5 on an ultrawide. The first launch takes a few minutes while it compiles shaders.

Full honesty: I'm not a developer on any of these projects and this was vibe coded with Claude. I tested it a lot on my own machine, but that's one machine. Everything in the repo is small and explained in a HOW-IT-WORKS doc, so if you're cautious (you should be), have your own AI agent or a friend look it over before you run anything, or build it yourself from source with the included scripts.

Also: anti-cheat on an emulator isn't officially supported by the devs. I haven't had any issues, but use it at your own risk.

If you try it on a different Mac (M1/M2/M4, base models, less RAM), I'd love to hear how it goes, good or bad.

Nintendo has not developed Battalion Wars game since 2002, since this is my favorite Wii game, I decided to join the decomps hype and start my own.

This is an earlier build with camera and collision bugs, then the current build (v0.1.0) on the second mission. The first mission plays start to finish; the second one opens with its cutscenes and plays with correct 3D and working controls. Current limits: 640x480 and 30 fps.

Next: rendering above 640x480 and PC controls, then the public repo. I'll post here again when the repo is public.

Full disclosure: the translator and runtime changes were developed with AI assistance (Claude Code), with every fix measured against traces of the running game and verified in-game before being kept. The plan, the debugging and what goes in are mine. Also the whole process is getting documented and will be uploaded a separate learning repo for everyone to start learning this process without solely relying on AI.

This is a static recompilation: the PowerPC code from main.dol is translated to C++ and linked against a runtime that replaces the Wii SDK and hardware (no emulator, no JIT). Graphics: Aurora (GX -> WebGPU) on Metal. It's a fork of WiiCompiled (the Mario Kart Wii recomp), retargeted to a single disc (RBWE01). You bring your own copy; nothing from the game is or will be in the repo.

Testing out the Bloodborne Mac port (Wooloomooloo2 repo) on the M4 Pro, and the experience so far is honestly pretty impressive, with consistent playable FPS without any upscaling at all just native 1080p. pulling 60 to low 44 FPS

Hardware & Build Specs:

• Mac: MBP M4 Pro (24GB Unified Memory / 512GB SSD)
• Port Version: 0.5.1
• Game Region: CUSA00900 (US) (Note: Not the recommended CUSA03173 EU version, but runs fine!)
• Settings:Imgur Screenshot

Performance / Notes:

Overall, the game is super enjoyable and completely playable. You’ll spot some missing textures and occasional missing floor geometry here and there, but nothing game-breaking at all.

Curious if anyone else is running the US version and seeing differences compared to the EU build?

i absolutely love that game and haven't been able to play it since i got my macbook air. i miss playing that game and was wondering if any good soul out there was free enough to port it so that i can run it on my mac with no issues?

i am aware that crossover can do that, but i have failed to do so.

I just started playing cronos new dawn on my m4 max. About 11 hours in and approaching the end. The performance on this game has been absolutely terrible, and at points unplayable. I’d seen a few videos detailing it, but they didnt really capture the scope of how poorly this game performs.

The first hour was choppy as all hell, no matter what settings I had and I came pretty close to refunding. After that there were frequent drops, but i managed to get a solid 55-60 fps on epic settings for the most part and it was manageable. Now randomly, 12 hours in, the game seems to have just broken again. I have to drop the game down to low to get somewhat decent performance or it’s a damn slide show.

Im not sure what changed but it has been so damn frustrating having to work around this games issues. It is genuinely baffling to me it was sold in this state. And its a shame because ive really enjoyed it. This game should serve as the ultimate example of how NOT to port a game on mac for developers.

Just wanted to detail my experience with it for anybody curious.

Developers susanya27 and GllevnP have officially published the open-source release of Tauri Silicon Driver v2.0.0 for macOS 15 Sequoia and macOS 26 Tahoe.

The project builds upon the architectural foundation of the earlier NullMoth driver, but introduces a completely redesigned pipeline: direct hardware shader translation into native SASS machine code via the NAK compiler delivers a more than 3x FPS increase and completely eliminates stutters. All games across Steam, CrossOver, and Heroic now launch seamlessly in 1 click without any command-line usage.

The driver supports all modern GeForce architectures — from the budget-friendly GTX 16xx series and popular RTX 20/30/40 lineups up to the cutting-edge RTX 50xx series based on Blackwell. It delivers native Metal 3 integration with hardware-accelerated ray tracing and MetalFX upscaling, high refresh rate display support up to 4K at 120Hz, 144Hz, and 240Hz, and includes a pre-packaged DMG installer with automated and safe OpenCore bootloader configuration.

Source Code & DMG Installer: https://github.com/susanya27/tauri-silicon-driver

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

while shimmying on the ledge (gameplay photo)... a specific explosion should trigger and a grapple point should become available for me to climb to.. but that doesnt happen

now I was running the game with modified settings to fit my deivce and preferences... including running at 60fps.. but had no issues for the 8hrs of a ten hour game.. until this point. nevertheless I reset all my settings and still the same thing. I can't import save files as none are available.. have already reset the checkpoint multiple times and gone as far back in the level as I can.. tried default settings and nothing works

also I noticed in the objectives (menu photo) that one of the 3 bombs I had to disable is still showing up on the map (maybe).. and I had a minor glitch there. now im not sure if that is the source of the issue but still.

Please read this description completely and try to help me out as the only alternative is replaying the entire thing in the hopes the level is fixed once I replay

Hey guys. I wanna play modern AAA titles on my MacBook. any suggestions? I am also gonna upgrade my MacBook to the latest pro if I can game completely on Mac as I use my Mac for everything so it can be my all in one device. 1440p 60-120fps multiplayer cod mw4,bf6 would be the cherry on the cake. fuck it, maybe even gta 6 lmao. ps im currently on macbook air m2.

Does anyone know the M4 Pro 20-Core equivalent of the NVIDIA GPU? According to Notebookcheck it's a 1660TI Laptop GPU, but then some people are saying it's the same as a 4060 laptop GPU?

Is Notebook check reliable?

Anyone played these 2 games on M4/M5 with Crossover? M4 and M5 should easily nail this game, but I get stutters and slow motion all the time. If you play them, could you let me know your settings? Thanks