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Game Porting Toolkit

From AppleGamingWiki, the wiki about gaming on M1 Apple silicon Macs

Game Porting Toolkit is Apple's new translation layer which combines Wine with Apple's own D3DMetal which supports DirectX 9-12.

Working games:

  • Cyberpunk 2077
  • Elden Ring
  • SpongeBob SquarePants: The Cosmic Shake
  • Diablo IV [1]
  • Hogwarts Legacy - requires Windows ver fix [2]
  • Deep Rock Galactic
  • Sonic Omens
  • Sonic P-06
  • Scarlet Nexus
  • Dyson Sphere Program (some objects and main character weren't visible before)
  • Derail Valley (awesome performance, no missing manuals - in-game objects for train operation - like on CrossOver)
  • Spider-Man (2018)
  • Spider-Man Miles Morales - requires Windows ver fix
  • Warframe - To get installer/launcher working add dwrite (disabled) to library overrides in winecfg
  • Deep Rock Galactic
  • HI-Fi RUSH
  • QUBE 2

Not working well:

  • Horizon Zero Dawn - slowdown issues

Toolkit install instructions

Requirements

  • macOS Sonoma should be used, it is possible to run this through macOS Ventura but this causes large numbers of issues with steamwebhelper.exe so it isn't recommended.
  • Visit Apple Developer Downloads site, these files are now free to download use for any logged in Apple account.
    • Search for Command Line Tools for Xcode 15 beta and download the dmg file, then install it.
    • If you have an old version Xcode installed, remove it.
    • Search for Game Porting Toolkit and download it. Open the dmg file and then run the pkg.

Homebrew

Open Terminal (search in Spotlight on macOS).

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.

Run this command to download Apple tap: 

brew tap apple/apple http://github.com/apple/homebrew-apple

Build

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. It can take over 1 hour to complete depending on the speed of your Mac. 

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

Wine prefix

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.

Preparing the toolkit

Make sure the Game Porting Toolkit dmg downloaded earlier is mounted at /Volumes/Game Porting Toolkit-1.0. Use this script to 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/

Put the 3 scripts from the Game Porting Toolkit DMG into here /usr/local/bin using this command: 

cp /Volumes/Game\ Porting\ Toolkit*/gameportingtoolkit* /usr/local/bin

Steam install

Go to Steam website and download the Windows version of Steam: https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/client/installer/SteamSetup.exe and place in your Downloads folder.

'Install Steam' 

gameportingtoolkit ~/my-game-prefix '~/Downloads/SteamSetup.exe'

Run Steam' 

gameportingtoolkit ~/my-game-prefix 'C:\Program Files (x86)/Steam/steam.exe'

Log into Steam A common issue is that Steam will present with a blank black window.

Alternate way of launching Steam (after installing): 

MTL_HUD_ENABLED=1 WINEESYNC=1 WINEPREFIX=~/my-game-prefix /usr/local/Cellar/game-porting-toolkit/1.0/bin/wine64 'C:\Program Files (x86)/Steam/steam.exe'

If this continues then close the Terminal window and then re-open and try again, repeat until the login screen opens. Now you should be able to download and launch Windows games through Steam.

Launching individual 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.

'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'

'C. Launching with Wine ESYNC disabled' 

gameportingtoolkit-no-esync ~/my-game-prefix 'C:\Program Files\MyGame\MyGame.exe'

Logging

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.

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

Steam login black screen Close the Terminal window and then reopen and retry the command, repeat several times.

Alternate way of launching Steam (after installing): 

MTL_HUD_ENABLED=1 WINEESYNC=1 WINEPREFIX=<path to the Wine bottle you set up> /usr/local/Cellar/game-porting-toolkit/1.0/bin/wine64 'C:\Program Files (x86)/Steam/steam.exe'

If still not working then try using CrossOver and create a Steam bottle, then redirect this WINEPREFIX to that bottle: 

WINEPREFIX="/Users/[username]/Library/Application Support/CrossOver/Bottles/Steam/"

Battle.net launcher won't re-launch

Re-install the launcher to reopen, no other fix at the moment.

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

steamwebhelper.exe crashes

This is caused by Steam being run through macOS Ventura or below, upgrade to macOS Sonoma.

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
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