If you're an old-school gamer and have a hankering to play DOS-based PC games on your Mac, you may have good luck with Boxer. What's more, a free trial is available for download, so you won't be on the hook to pay anything to give it a shot. Still, if you're more comfortable with an app that's supported by a company, CrossOver may be worth a try.

Many other unsupported games do, in fact work - the CrossOver community has many notes about what to do or how to get them to work, which are referenced by the installation program.

Its list of actual supported games is pretty small. My experience with CrossOver - like Wine - is somewhat hit or miss. Like Wine, it's a Windows compatibility layer for the Mac that enables some games to run.ĬodeWeavers has modified the source code to Wine, made some improvements to configuration to make it easier, and provided support for their product, so you shouldn't be out in the cold if you have trouble getting things to run. CrossOver Mac is Wine with specialized Mac support. Note: At the time of this writing, The Wine Project does not support macOS 10.15 Catalina.ĬodeWeavers took some of the sting out of Wine by making a Wine-derived app called CrossOver Mac. Wine doesn't work with all games, so your best bet is for you to start searching for which games you'd like to play and whether anyone has instructions to get it working on the Mac using Wine. It isn't for the faint of heart, although there are instructions online, and some kind souls have set up tutorials, which you can find using Google. You can use straight-up Wine if you're technically minded. So when a game says 'draw a square on the screen,' the Mac does what it's told. The easiest way to think about it is as a compatibility layer that translates Windows Application Programming Interface (API) calls into something that the Mac can understand.

It's been around the Unix world for a very long time, and because OS X is a Unix-based operating system, it works on the Mac too.Īs the name suggests, Wine isn't an emulator. Wine is a recursive acronym that stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator. OS X is POSIX-compliant, too (it's Unix underneath all of Apple's gleam, after all), so Wine will run on the Mac also.

It's called The Wine Project, and the effort continues to this day. More than 20 years ago, a project was started to enable Windows software to work on POSIX-compliant operating systems like Linux. The Mac isn't the only computer whose users have wanted to run software designed for Windows.

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