Game Porting Toolkit
Stub page for Game Porting Toolkit - Apple.
Download Game Porting Toolkit here: https://developer.apple.com/download/all/?q=game%20porting%20toolkit
My game won’t run because it thinks the version of Windows is too old. Some games detect specific minimum versions of Windows and need to be updated. Use this script to update your wineprefix with build 19042 which should work for most games e.g. Hogwarts Legacy.
WINEPREFIX=~/my-game-prefix `brew --prefix game-porting-toolkit`/bin/wine64 reg add 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion' /v CurrentBuild /t REG_SZ /d 19042 /f WINEPREFIX=~/my-game-prefix `brew --prefix game-porting-toolkit`/bin/wine64 reg add 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion' /v CurrentBuildNumber /t REG_SZ /d 19042 /f WINEPREFIX=~/my-game-prefix `brew --prefix game-porting-toolkit`/bin/wineserver -k
Working games:
- Cyberpunk 2077
- Elden Ring
- SpongeBob SquarePants: The Cosmic Shake
Requires:
- macOS Sonoma
- Ensure the Command Line Tools for Xcode 15 beta are installed. Visit https://developer.apple.com/downloads to download these tools.
Install Rosetta:
softwareupdate --install-rosetta
Enter an x86_64 shell to continue the following steps in a Rosetta environment. All subsequent commands should be run within this shell.
arch -x86_64 zsh
Install the x86_64 version of Homebrew if you don't already have it.
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
Make sure the brew command is on your path:
which brew
If this command does not print /usr/local/bin/brew, you must either modify your PATH to put /usr/local/bin first, or fully specify the path to brew in the subsequent commands.
Tap the Apple Homebrew tap, which can be found at https://github.com/apple:
brew tap apple/apple http://github.com/apple/homebrew-apple
Install the game-porting-toolkit formula. This formula downloads and compiles several large software projects. How long this takes will depend on the speed of your computer.
brew -v install apple/apple/game-porting-toolkit
If during installation you see an error such as “Error: game-porting-toolkit: unknown or unsupported macOS version: :dunno”, your version of Homebrew doesn’t have macOS Sonoma support. Update to the latest version of Homebrew and try again.
brew update brew -v install apple/apple/game-porting-toolkit
2. Create a new Wine prefix for your Game Porting Toolkit environment
A Wine prefix contains a virtual C: drive. You will install the toolkit and your game into this virtual C: drive. Run the following command to create a new Wine prefix named my-game-prefix in your home directory.
WINEPREFIX=~/my-game-prefix `brew --prefix game-porting-toolkit`/bin/wine64 winecfg
- A “Wine configuration” window should appear on your screen.
- Change the version of Windows to Windows 10.
- Choose Apply and then OK to exit winecfg.
If the “Wine configuration” window does not appear, and no new icon appears in the Dock, verify that you have correctly installed the x86_64 version of Homebrew as well as the game-porting-toolkit formula.
3. Install the toolkit into the Wine prefix
The graphics bridge libraries need to be placed inside your Wine prefix in order to finalize your game evaluation environment. These instructions assume you have mounted the Game Porting Toolkit at /Volumes/Game Porting Toolkit-1.0.
- Copy the Game Porting Toolkit library directory into Wine’s library directory.
ditto /Volumes/Game\ Porting\ Toolkit-1.0/lib/ `brew --prefix game-porting-toolkit`/lib/
Launch your game
Open your Wine prefix’s virtual C: drive in Finder (open ~/my-game-prefix/drive_c) and copy your game into an appropriate subdirectory.
The provided bin/gameportingtoolkit* scripts can be copied onto your path to facilitate different forms of logging and launching. You can run these scripts from any shell; you don’t need to switch to the Rosetta environment first.
A. Standard launching:
gameportingtoolkit ~/my-game-prefix 'C:\Program Files\MyGame\MyGame.exe'
This launches the given Windows game binary with a visible extended Metal Performance HUD and filters logging to output from the Game Porting Toolkit.
B. Launching without a HUD
gameportingtoolkit-no-hud ~/my-game-prefix 'C:\Program Files\MyGame\MyGame.exe'
Launches your game without the extended Metal Performance HUD visible.
C. Launching with Wine ESYNC disabled
gameportingtoolkit-no-esync ~/my-game-prefix 'C:\Program Files\MyGame\MyGame.exe'
Finally, the no-esync versions of the script disable Wine's ESYNC option, a common compatibility flag. If your game experiences issues with multithreading, or you get an error message about running out of files, you can try launching your game without this Wine environment variable enabled to see if disabling esync clears the problem.
Logging
Logging output will appear in the Terminal window in which you launch your game as well as the system log, which can be viewed with the Console app found in Applications ▸ Utilities. Log messages from the Game Porting Toolkit are prefixed with D3DM. By default the gameportingtoolkit* scripts will filter to just the D3DM-prefixed messages.
Troubleshooting
My game won't run and crashes with an invalid instruction
Invalid instruction crashes are often (but not always) caused when Rosetta 2 is unable to translate AVX/AVX2 instructions. You may be able to recompile a version of your game without AVX/AVX2 instructions in order to evaluate its potential on Apple Silicon with the Game Porting Toolkit when you hit this error. When porting your code natively to Apple Silicon, NEON instructions are a high-performance replacement for AVX/AVX2.
My game won't run because its anti-cheat or DRM software is incompatible with Wine translation.
You may be able to rebuild a custom version of your game in your Windows development environment with anti-cheat or DRM disabled for your own evaluation purposes. When porting your code natively to Apple Silicon and macOS, contact your anti-cheat or DRM provider—most have native Apple Silicon solutions for your native build.
My game won’t run because it requires Mono, .NET, or the MSVCRT runtime.
The game porting toolkit’s evaluation environment does not pre-install these runtime support packages. If your game makes use of one of these packages, consider searching for and downloading appropriate installers (.exe or .msi) and installing them to your evaluation environment. Additional runtime installers can be run on your environment by just launching the installer and following its installation instructions:
WINEPREFIX=~/my-game-prefix `brew --prefix game-porting-toolkit`/bin/wine64 <some-installer.exe>
And .MSI packages can be installed by launching the Windows uninstaller application and choosing to install a downloaded .msi package:
WINEPREFIX=~/my-game-prefix `brew --prefix game-porting-toolkit`/bin/wine64 uninstaller