apple's got so much power that we'll get a whole collection of metal only games
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Apple Releases Tool to Help Developers Port Windows Games to Mac
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Maybe Aspyr can finally bring Command & Conquer: Generals into 2023 and on AS! That would be awesome and I would gladly pay for that!
Grid 2 Reloaded Edition would be my next favourite Mac game to bring to AS that won't run on modern Mac hardware.
I'm thinking of many 32-bit Mac games that need to make it over to 64-bit Mac land and AS.
Grid 2 Reloaded Edition would be my next favourite Mac game to bring to AS that won't run on modern Mac hardware.
I'm thinking of many 32-bit Mac games that need to make it over to 64-bit Mac land and AS.
OK I'M DOING THIS!!! THIS IS AWESOME! MAC GAMING IS HERE!Yes, they can and have. Apple's toolkit is just CrossOver 22.1.1 with patches applied to support DirectX 12 games.
This can also be confirmed by reading Apple's installer script.
Wine comes to macOS: Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit powered by CrossOver source code | CodeWeavers Blog
By Meredith Johnson | We are ecstatic that Apple chose to use CrossOver’s source code as their emulation solution for the Game Porting Toolkit.www.codeweavers.com
It is not intended for end-users though, the whole setup process is command line based.
Codeweavers will be adding DirectX 12 support officially to their Crossover product in version 23 later this year and it's already in nightly tester builds, although it's not as compatible right now as apple's patched version of 22.
If Apple developed an emulator that is good enough to run games on, why are we still messing around with dual computers or Parallels?
Why not just release this like Rosetta.
Why not just release this like Rosetta.
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Thanks @groove-agent - yes, I intended to state “hardware-accelerated ray tracing”. My understanding is that the existing/released Apple Silicon chips (or iPhone variants) do not have this ability.
I think Apple is letting the average nerd do this on purpose. They know the nerds will do it if the devs wont.
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I’ve been reading that Aspyr is having difficulty with so PC games they are developing (KOTOR expansion, I believe) so perhaps they’ll return to their ‘port to mac’ roots even if it’s ‘easier’ now.
Agreed.
I'm hoping this is NOT some half-stepping all over again that we keep seeing from Apple ever few short years.
Anyone remember the half-step for eGPU support?! Then it faded?
#Blackmagic #egpu
Attachments
I'm no lawyer, but from my understanding if it modifies any of the code, then that's against the license agreement. Wouldn't this have to be approved by the game developer that has rights to the code?
I don’t know if it is so easy to do it but when I now see what it’s possible, I ask me, how long does it take until Apple put a M2/PRO/MAX into an AppleTV and we have an Apple console, where AAA games are work. can’t wait until September event. Hope we will something 😊
The M3 SOC will probably be the sweet spot for gaming on the Mac. But it's great to see that Apple appears to be finally taking this seriously and are building up momentum.
Don’t get your hopes up. Listen to this take from the Linus WAN show yesterday. Ultra-short version: Apple did very little, it’s not a translator, and this still requires developers to do a full port.
The proprietary part is their own implementation of DX12 libraries as a binary blob, so, called out of code, not linked into code. They've provided the shim code that calls it. As kind of frustrating as that is, for the wider use of what appears to be a rather nice library, but at least you can use it personally I guess, just prevents commercial usage.
It does seem odd that they don't give some kind of dx12 to metal translation library for actual game porting, though. I guess they really want everything to try and be actual metal native..
I too was disappointed when eGPUs were no longer supported. At that time I saw the potential docking my MBP to an eGPU to do some gaming.
Maybe now that all the Macs are Apple Silicon they will look to add eGPU support again ... or the M3 is going to have a monster amount of GPU cores.
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Considering how terrible recent PC ports are these days, maybe developers can make good Mac ports instead.
Maybe.
Hopefully.
Maybe.
Hopefully.
That being said, it's interesting that Blizzard doesn't enable raytracing as an option in World of Warcraft. It's there, but greyed out on my M1 Pro.
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By any chance, if time permits, I think this SwiftUI wrapper of Wine will get some wings… I didn’t have enough luck yet, but didn’t try hard enough. It has support for adding Apple’s GamePortingToolkit upon getting and unzipping the app:
GitHub - Whisky-App/Whisky: A modern Wine wrapper for macOS built with SwiftUI
A modern Wine wrapper for macOS built with SwiftUI - Whisky-App/Whisky
github.com
I see this as nothing less than a positive. Can’t wait till the M3max chip comes out. Gonna get a MacBook Pro with that.
Me also - holding out for M3 although I have a bad feeling we won't see it until 2024.
The eGPU support stopped at AMD 6 series. I don't see this gaming stuff being successful on macs. Gamers like modding the bios, overclocking, upgrading rams and gpu, a flexibility that doesn't exist with macs. Still macs are great for productivity and editing not for serious gaming.
Porting Kit is an interesting incentive for developers, but is it enough?
1. Apple's pricing is not competitive compared to Windows and consoles. Core gamers will not be attracted. So this effort on Apple's side might, to a large extent, only help to satisfy the wishes of existing Mac users, and giving one more reason to people who consider buying a Mac anyway.
2. At the moment Apple cannot seriously compete with nVidia and AMD in terms of raw GPU power and swapability. Maybe an MxUltra SoC gets close, but this leads back to point 1.
3. Apple has a history of breaking compatibility. Who knows what happens with future OS releases? There is a big difference between releasing a software and supporting it.
1. Apple's pricing is not competitive compared to Windows and consoles. Core gamers will not be attracted. So this effort on Apple's side might, to a large extent, only help to satisfy the wishes of existing Mac users, and giving one more reason to people who consider buying a Mac anyway.
2. At the moment Apple cannot seriously compete with nVidia and AMD in terms of raw GPU power and swapability. Maybe an MxUltra SoC gets close, but this leads back to point 1.
3. Apple has a history of breaking compatibility. Who knows what happens with future OS releases? There is a big difference between releasing a software and supporting it.
I played around with this a bit and got diablo 4 working. Runs surprisingly well. Exciting times