OS X Running Steam games in Wine

[matt3526]

Hi all,

I have a macbook pro. I love steam games but I hate windows. I was therefore wondering if it is possible to run steam games (and/or steam) inside a wrapper? I would want to be able to play my steam games multiplier. How would I do this? Do I just move the game files to a wrapper and run it? Will that work with multiplayer? Do I put steam in a wrapper, then download the game and run it?

I know it's a lot of questions, I just want to know how to do it.

Also, how would I be able to use a ps3 controller in this setup? I normally use motionjoy in windows. would this work in wine too? Could I have it inside the same wrapper as steam? Thanks.

Matt

 

[Renzatic]

This is a complicated as hell question that can't easily be answered. Not only do you have to get Steam to run in Wine, but you have to individually set up all the games to run from it as well.

I haven't done it myself. Most of my experience with Wine was getting a couple-three older games up and running. Comparatively an easy thing to do. That said, I do know it's possible, because I've seen videos and how-tos of people running games like Dishonored and Dark Souls from Steam through it.

So it can be done, but it's probably convoluted as hell to do. The best thing for you to do is make those first steps yourself, and ask for help when you run into a specific problem.

 

[Dirtyharry50]

This is not hard to do but does require an initial investment of roughly several hours of learning. Once you make this investment though, you are in good shape to get whatever will run in Wine, including Steam games, working.

Here is a good place to begin:

Get Wineskin. This is an excellent tool that simplifies working with Wine on Mac. You can find it here:

http://wineskin.urgesoftware.com/tiki-index.php

You can also find a FAQ and Manual on this site and you will need to read them to learn about Wine and how to use this tool with it.

That should get you off to a good start. The next very important thing you should do is find and bookmark the WineHQ AppDB site which is a searchable database of games with information about how well each one works or does not work with Wine, tips for getting a particular game to work that may be needed and information on Wine versions known to work, all of which are easily accessible via Wineskin as you need them.

There's no free lunch as they say. This isn't quite a drag and drop thing to do but it also isn't rocket science by any stretch. If you are willing to invest a few hours in learning about Wineskin and the tools it offers you for working with Wine it will be well worth it for those games that work well. And again, to find out about those games, visit WineHQ and then click on the AppDB tab to search for whatever it is you want to try to get working on your Mac.

You probably know this if you have Steam but there is a good selection of Mac games there with new ones coming regularly. Today for example, Batman Arkham City GOTY became available for Mac on Steam (thanks Feral) and it is on sale now too.

 

[matt3526]

Thanks for the information. I will have a look through that db and take it from there.

 

[smoketetsu]

Just so anyone who's not aware of this knows... some of those games like Batman Arkham City have been available on the Mac for some time not just this week when it was rereleased on Steam.

For example Arkham Asylum has been available for Mac for even longer (as it should be) but if you go by what's on Steam you'd think it's not.

You need to check Aspyr or Feral's site as they have quite a few games they've published that are not yet available on Steam.

Examples:
Bioshock 1 and 2 by Feral
RAGE by Aspyr
Sonic & SEGA Allstars Racing by Feral
Deus Ex Human Revolution by Feral
Lord of The Rings War In The North by Feral

As you can see most of the stuff that's not on Steam is by Feral... but Aspyr has a game or two that's not on there as well.

Also, it is pretty true that often times Wine gaming can be complicated and it takes time to troubleshoot and find the right settings and dll's to load to make a game not only run but run well and glitch free. That is.. unless there are bugs in Wine that are exposed by the game which need fixing upstream by the maintainers of Wine. I've tinkered a lot with Wine for years now and have played a lot of games via it and have seen it gradually improve.

If there's a native version I'd say go for that first as they've done pretty much most of the work for you by hand porting the game natively. It's more of a plug and play experience than Wine wrapping to be honest.

The only reason why I'd use a Wine wrapper for a game that has been ported natively is for example with Bioshock 1 Feral didn't port it with true positional surround sound enabled and didn't include any antialiasing options. I can do dll overrides in Wine to enable those things in a wrapped version.

I was doing the same thing with Doom 3 to run the graphics enhancement mod called "sikkmod" and openal soft to fix the sound but then someone compiled the sikkmod for Aspyrs version and then I figured out how to make it use the Mac version of OpenAL Soft fixing the true 5.1 surround sound. So I stopped using the wine version.

 

[Red Cube]

Multiplayer through Wine is nigh near impossible. The only game I've known that has working multiplayer through Wine is Ace of Spades Classic, and even then you had to insert the I.P. address into the .EXE flags box in the advanced section of that wrappers wineskin, which is in the ports package contents. I also think that Punkbuster would kick you, thinking the emulator (Wine) is a hack/virus.
In the end I was so frustrated that I bought a copy of Windows 7 and made a partition using Boot Camp. Now I almost never use my Mac partition for gaming, while cross platform games I played on Mac OSX ran so much faster. That $60-$90 may be worth it, though I don't think you'll like the OS much.

Oh, and check out the Porting Team, since there are so many ports, including a stable version of Steam through Wine.

 

[smoketetsu]

As with most things it depends on the game whether or not the multiplayer works or not. I've played multiplayer games via Wine just fine before such as with Star Trek Voyager Elite Force. The native port of that was for older versions of OS X and does not work on any latest version. But using Wine or Cider it works just fine including multiplayer. There's no rule saying multiplayer never works in Wine or is always hard to get to work.

It's sort of a your mileage may vary situation and one person's experience may not nessarily reflect another.

I've never heard of middleware such as punkbuster flagging Wine as a virus.

I also use Wine to run a few steam games in Linux on my notebook. Due to the type of GPU I have on there I run into different compatibility issues than on my iMac under OS X. Like Serious Sam (classic) has issues with its OpenGL renderer compared to its Direct3D one ironically necessitating the need to use the latter ironically.

Just in case anyone gets confused none of the officially published games by Feral or Aspyr use Wine or any of its derivatives. They have their own DirectX to OpenGL\AL\etc. toolsets that they use and tend to substitute the middleware the games have with Mac native versions.