Ask HN: What's the state of the art of playing Windows games on macOS with Wine?

2 points

4 years ago

Around 2015, if you wanted to play your vintage Windows games on your Mac, you could launch Wineskin Winery[0], pass the game installer to it and get the game as a Mac app.

Today, the wrapped games from back then don't work any more due to Apple's 64-bit transition. Wineskin Winery is defunct. There is a fork[1] that claims to work but it beachballed my Mac the last time I tried and the project is somewhat shady anyways. (Claims to be LGPL but binaries are provided without source code).

I tried CrossOver[2] several times but the UI is so confusing that I never get anything to run. I am aware of virtualization but I would like not to buy Windows licenses or boot entire operating systems to play my games. I miss being able to just stuff a game into a wrapper and be done. What are the options today?

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20131201065712/http://wineskin.urgesoftware.com/tiki-index.php

[1]: https://github.com/Gcenx/WineskinServer

[2]: https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover