Whisky - run Windows games under macOS on Apple Silicon

[+SpiceWare]

Ran across this video on YouTube last night about Whisky. It uses Wine and Apple's Game Porting toolkit to run Windows games.  The example video walks thru installing and running games from Steam.

 

I don't have many games in Steam, and most of the games I have do not run (denoted with 🚫) on my current Mac (a Studio with Apple's M2 Ultra CPU):

 

 

So I installed Whisky, then install Steam in Whisky. The 🚫 symbol does not show up by any of the games:

 

 

Haven't played Peggle in years so decided to install it. When I launched it the program displayed the Loading screen for long time:

 

 

Long enough that I thought it hung.  I let it be though, and it eventually finished loading. I started a game:

 

 

and while it did run the audio and game both stuttered.  Did a little research, found this, and did the following in Whisky which resolved the stuttering issue:

 

1. File -> Kill All Bottles
2. Click on Winetricks...
3. Select DLLs tab
4. Select dsound
5. click Run...
6. Run Steam
7. Launch Peggle

 

[+Sauron]

Just came across this thread. I've got an M2 Pro Mac Mini and just installed Whisky on it, and I was wondering if it's at all possible to run some of the Windows-only emulators on it. In particular, I'd like to see if I can get BigPEmu to work, as it would be so much nicer to not have to switch over to my Windows machine to run it. I'll have to remember this thread and update it once I get around to it.

 

[+Sauron]

Just as a quick update...

 

I tried running BigPEmu in Whisky with default bottle settings, and it worked. However, I didn't try playing any games as the interface for BigPEmu sucks and I didn't have the patience to figure it out. I'm gonna try a few other emulators when I get a chance and see how well they work.

 

[+SpiceWare]

This past weekend we installed Whisky, and the Windows version of Steam, on my dad's new Mac mini with the M2 Pro.  Was a disappointing experience for most of the games he wanted to play, namely various versions of Sid Meier's Civilization.

 

Some failed to run. Looking at the Common issues page it sounds like Rosetta will have new functionality, such as supporting AVX instructions, in the next version of macOS. We plan to try those again after Sequoia is released.

 

Some would launch with black screens on both monitors.  We did figure out it was related to having two monitors - when we COMMAND-TABbed to another program and then back to the game we'd briefly see a game image that would quickly be moved "between" the screens.  By setting the Displays to be Mirrored, instead of Extended, we were able to get the games to show up and be playable.

 

He does have Peggle and that played just fine after we fixed the sound issue by following the steps at the bottom of my initial post.

 

I do see they have a GitHub page, I'll have to go back to my folks and figure out which games we tried have the dual monitor problem and open an issue.