“Apple has created a new Game Porting Toolkit that’s similar to the work Valve has done with Proton and the Steam Deck. It’s powered by source code from CrossOver, a Wine-based solution for running Windows games on macOS. Apple’s tool will instantly translate Windows games to run on macOS, allowing developers to launch an unmodified version of a Windows game on a Mac and see how well it runs before fully porting a game.”
The new software will allow Mac users* (see edit) to play ‘Windows games’ on their Apple silicon (M1/M2) devices. With development, this has the potential to bring gaming to Apple.
*EDIT: The Game Porting Toolkit is designed for developers to see how their game performs on Apple silicone to entice devs to create native ports. Thanks to commenters for pointing out this distinction. The CrossOver project on which it is built, I believe, is designed for end-users to run software on their Mac clients.
I want to see Apple contributing more to the open-source CrossOver project, both in terms of code and financing. Their contribution has been minimal and Apple’s audacity in essentially repackaging open-source software is disgusting to me. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
How good is crossover? Would you recommend it?
This isn’t Proton-like, this IS Proton. Proton is what Valve call their WINE version. Codeweavers actively build WINE and give it away and they’ve looked at the Apple code and it IS WINE.
You’re welcome Apple! Assholes. Least you could do would be to contribute, but then the magic is taken away from your dictatorship isn’t it? Can’t have that.
You are mostly correct, but from my understanding the “Game Porting Toolkit” system isn’t just the CodeWeavers’ WINE part but also includes the Rosetta x64 to ARM translator and the D3DMetal translation layer as well. So through those layers many instructions can fall through the cracks.
All in all, neat that games can even be played on a Mac in the first place, but you still get relatively bad performance, restrictive licensing on use, worse compatibility than Proton. That’s living in Apple’s wonderful walled garden, for ya.
Eh, this doesn’t sound anywhere near as impressive as what Valve did for Proton itself. First of all, Proton is actually good to the point where native linux ports aren’t even needed (although appreciated), its not just for dev prototyping.
And as the top post said, Apple’s fork of CrossOver is not public. Pretty expected from Apple by this point.
Similar, but not the same, to proton. Few games will work well enough to be playable off the bat. Most will still require porting work be done by the developer, to bring the game to a point that’d be considered playable.
Much like how the “linux-support” of many game engines went unused, I’m sceptical. The reason proton has been so successful is that it has been able to get the ball rolling with zero or near-zero work input required from the devs of the games it has brought to linux. This has give linux gaming enough of a start that putting in the work becomes more appealing in the cases where it is needed.
Just putting out the tools and telling devs, “use them” may not be enough to get mac gaming back on track.
And Linux gaming is already here for years now ;)
I know it’s been a joke for as long as I can remember, but I really think this year (or last) was the year of the Linux desktop. All the work done on proton has seemed to bring lots of gamers over who were tired of Windows bs.
The tools for this are interesting. But I think the headline was slightly misleading to be called a Proton-like tool. This is more of a diagnostic tool than a translation layer to play games for troubleshooting than anything else. Even maxed out M2 Ultra devices are only getting like 30-40 FPS on Cyberpunk because of how many resources the tool uses. I personally hope it does incentivize some devs to port to macOS as a primary Mac user. Devs need to see a cost benefit to do it. Apple convincing one dev per year to port a AAA game to Mac is not enough of an effort to actually convince people of anything.
That being said, Apple has had very inconsistent messaging regarding gaming in the past. And Steve Jobs notoriously did not care for gaming. Really, the only gaming success they are having right now is mobile games. And despite on/off rumors of a dedicated gaming device. I would just not be encouraged based on the majority of offerings on Apple Arcade that there would be much worthwhile. The only reason I even have it is because my phone plan includes it. Otherwise I would never touch it.
I’m actually excited for this.
Not expecting much of the latest AAA games being ported over, but excited for older games, that are either broken when Mac abandoned 32-bit, or titles that could have been ported over but didn’t because Apple didn’t care much about gaming.
Also I wonder if this porting toolkit could help with the development of emulators. Citra had issues with Mac, and even now OpenEmu is having issue with the shaders.
If they end up contributing upstream, great and I see no issue. If not, a bit scummy, but its Apple we are talking about, so thats to be expected :)
