Play your Windows Steam Library on your Apple Silicon Mac (for free)

this video is a quick start guide to get you up and running Windows games from your steam library on Apple silicon Mac in about 6 minutes by now you've probably heard about Apple's game porting toolkit also known as gpk a utility designed to assist porting DirectX based games to Mac and it happens to have the ability to run Windows games on the Mac this process originally required installing a bunch of utilities and tools via the command line and it wasn't a streamlined process but now it is thanks to apps like whiskey this app is 100% free but the caveat is gpk was only designed to work with directex 11 and 12 what this means is it was designed for more modern titles to get started what you need first is an apple silicon Mac sorry Intel users and it needs to be running at the very minimum Mac OS 13 Ventura but Mac OS 14 somoma is strongly recommended at this time of recording so check the whiskey GitHub page for the latest info all links mentioned in this video are in the description keep in mind just like a PCC a higher spec Mac will perform better I'm using the M1 Max with 32 GB of RAM also games can be quite large so you'll need enough free space for the games the first step is to download whiskey this app is Tiny double click it click through the first time run prompts and it should prompt you with a dialogue box for the dependencies whiskey should let you install both the requirements which are Rosetta 2 a translation technology by Apple that allows Macs with apple silicon processors to run software designed for x86 and gpk the total will be over 400 megabytes the next step is to go to the steam website and click install Steam on the downloads page click the windows icon to download the windows version of steam this is important now go back to Whiskey and click create new bottle for context G gpdk uses wine and wine bottles are self-contained environments that allow Windows applications to run on non- Windows operating systems I am going to name this bottle steam so I know that's steam in the future I'm going to click create next click the open C drive then drag the steam setup.exe into the drive C folder this is Wine's virtual representation of a Windows drive this will be where all our Windows applications are installed now go back to Whiskey and click run and the steam setup you'll need to go through the steam setup as if it were a normal PC I'll skip ahead but just proceed as if this was a normal steam install Mac OS may ask if you'd like to Grant access to the microphone as Steam uses the mic for communication you can select either option based on your preferences this whole process will take longer than if this was a real PC from here you can install games as you normally would just be aware sometimes important dialogue boxes can can be hidden behind the steam application these often pop up the first time you run a game I installed parkasaurus as the first game to test as it's relatively small and it's an underappreciated indie game modeled after Sim theme park games I highly recommend it if you like old Max's Sim games or bullfrog Sim games unsurprisingly this game runs great as it's not terribly demanding despite the game displaying a Cloud sync error my cloud save games loaded fine now some important to understand many older titles are unlikely to work if I try Far Cry it won't launch and that's not surprising now what is is if I try a game like Shadow of Mordor which is a direct X11 game and it fails to launch this may be because of AVX instructions which Rosetta does not support or other compatibility issues a game like Grand Theft Auto 5 Plays great on my M1 Max often when you launch a game sometimes they'll be in in a small window I had to go to the game settings and apply changes to get GTA 5 to switch to full screen also you cannot change the resolution within the game apps or at least the games that I tried you'll need to do this from the system preferences by changing the resolution scaling it's best to do this before you launch the game in my limited testing gam pad controllers work great I plugged in my PlayStation 4 controller which I had previously synced to Mac OS and it's working out of the box in GTA 5 as far as I know there is not a ton of info on games that are compatible with gpk Apple gaming Wiki has a listing and you can see that shadow Mordor is listed as not compatible as I updated the wiki while making this video on the other hand parkasaurus is listed as perfect I also updated that listing the GitHub page for whiskey has a thread on game compatibility and a game compatibility Wiki the game compatibility Wiki focuses on a Advanced configuration to get harder to run titles to work with gpk if someone has a better source for game compatibility please let me know in the comments and I'll try to keep the description updated the last bit of advice is you should always check the latest releases on the whiskey GitHub page to see the latest release notes as it's still being actively developed if you have problems closing a game or steam use kill all bottles in the whiskey menu to uninstall games use Steam if you would like to completely deinstall whiskey and gpk follow these steps launch whiskey and then from the whiskey menu go to setup click uninstall next to gpk from the main application window right click your bottles then select remove be sure to check remove all files from disk now you can Trash the whiskey application again it's important to stress that not all games are compatible and that there's other programs that may work better for certain titles like crossover or Parallels

Channel: Definitive Mac Upgrade Guide

Views: 344,072

Keywords: Apple, Mac, macOS, Mac Pro

Id: 8KeES5llh9I

Length: 6min 2sec (362 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 21 2024