barrel
Why no one fucking runs games on a macbook
So i knew beforehand that this wouldnt work on some level. like on some level i was very extremely hyper aware that i was trying to do something that wasnt meant to work at all, but there is an entire subreddit for macgaming and if there's a will there's a way right? even for my untranslated yaoi games released only on dvd in my birth year? of course anything is possible. and a lot of the reason why i actually continued with what ended up being an exercise in futility was that i was able to get aforementioned yaoi games to run at all on my old laptop (lenovo yoga). it's all documented in previous posts on here about the sheer amount of hoops i jumped through, the dvd mounters.... changing locale.. isos and cracks..... like whatever the fuck i was doing it was complicated enough for me to think i could take on trying to run windows games on a macbook. Trying to run street fighter 6 alongside lamento btv. we got halfway there i guess but sf6 was my real goal:
Options to make windows real
by "make windows real" I mean exactly that. there are many ways to get windows onto a macbook and continue to run macOS alongside it. this was my initial plan, before even getting the puter, i knew that it was something that people did and would pretty much work. Like that was just the extent of my knowledge before i got into the gaming specific stuff cuz i was opposed to even laying a finger on macOS at all- my files werent compatible and well i thought it was fucking ugly and stupid. My plans get ruined though for many reasons.
Bootcamp: bootcamp is a way that you can install windows on a mac and pick whether to boot into windows or macOS on startup. however this only works for macbooks that have an Intel chip, and i think apple is moving away from those... this option i found would not work for me since i Dont have an intel chip. the one in my puter is m3. So already this is way fucking harder than I thought it would be lol!
virtual machines: a virtual machine basically emulates a different computers processing system on Your puter. so creating a windows virtualization involves a few different other programs, the nicest one being parallels (expensive..) and a free one being UTM. the virtualization just looks like a wee tab on your puter that has a desktop on it pretty much. it isnt the same as Bootcamp, which actually installs windows, virtual machines just delude your mac into thinking its a windows computer for a bit in order to run the operating system. they work at the same time and you can transfer files between them but as i found out this...... was not actually efficient for running games.. it's more like if you have software that really doesnt work on macos, such as autodesk or something.
it's at this point where it becomes clear that i know nothing about how games or anything works in general. so i do some pondering and decide ykw I still need the virtualization because, my visual novel files are pretty small, and they need to be run in a japanese locale. U cant change the locale on mac and .exe files dont work anyways.so i downloaded UTM and changed the locale and everything and it was all well and good, until i tried to download a dvd mounter within the virtual machine, and it didnt work. Like obviously because theres no actual fucking disk or hardware the dvd mounter can delude to mount a dvd file on. i cant stack computer delusion like that. So i started freaking out for no reason because i was like holy fucking shitballs lamento and dmmd:re cant run because i cant mount their files! silly me.... i only needed that for the initial installation process to make the files readable for windows10..
i later figured out that i could just put all the game files on a usb and plug it into the mac for it to be read by the windows virtualization and play it on that. Sounds like a lot of steps right? IT IS but well at the time to me i was grateful to figure out that i didnt need to go through the entire unzipping and mounting process to install those games anew. Like i dont know why i thought that in the first place but whatever lol. i was content with running a few games through UTM, but i still needed to get steam. UTM is laggy as fuck man. running a small windows on ur mac for free? yeah it's... not really the best. so we go back to r/macgaming......
Compatibility layers
the reasons why the above dont work for games is just because emulating windows is this extra step that ends up making the games slow as shit. like alllll this work is being put in to run the entire operating system (on a delusion) and then you want to run a game on top of that delusion? it isn't going to work out super well! but that has all been pretty much flattened into one thing, called a compatibility layer. functionally it just translates windows inputs into mac inputs. less hoops to jump through and whatnot. The one that everyone uses is called wine, but that shit is literally raw code. so there are a couple different programs of note that use wine as the base code, and add some extra silly little things on top to make it easier for the average silly little guy to use, so that U dont have to worry about. Literally typing commands into terminal omg//
crossover: paid!!!! its 74 freaking dollars for a years worth of support and after that you have to buy the newest version of it! but that money goes to wine devs and it is the main supporter for making sure that wine can help run new games and all kinds of stuff in general. it is universally considered the best option for running watever ur heart desires and also uses the newest version of wine. you might be wondering what is the difference between the wine versions? what the hell are they even updating?!??!. This i could not really tell you. I know nothing about computers. but if you want to read about it it is here https://www.winehq.org/.
whisky: ahhh whisky my free goat.. basically like crossover except with less extra silly things. cant run certain super new games or super old games, doesn't have the latest wine version but that is because the whisky devs didnt want to take everyone away from crossover:p it's good, and silly, and i use it!
i downloaded whisky and everything went pretty smoothly for a bit. downloaded the windows version of steam, ran it, sometimes it would open by itself but that was just steam shenanigans im pretty sure. i could download my games and it was fine! now before we get back to the main plot of trying to run sf6 i am taking two little detours to explain some random (yaoi game induced) stuff i ran into:
Steam Versions
This is honestly just dumb as fuck in so many ways. but when you download steam with the intent to use it with a compatibility layer, you need to download the windows version of steam, which has all the windows available games on it. remember this because there is also a completely seperate mac version of steam that is specificially for installing on a mac! yes just different files altogether!!! .exe vs .dmg and for what? because some games actually do have a fucking mac compatible edition and those are only available on mac steam? whatever. point being you cant access the mac versions of games from the windows download of steam and vice versa, which is why you Need to run steam through a compatibility layer at all.
there are exactly THREE games that i own that have a mac version: stardew valley, MAMIYA, and hades. I love hades and stardew but i have played them pretty extensively up to now so im not that tight about possibly losing access to them. but MAMIYA is a vn that has been on my list for some time and i reallyyyy really want to play it!! when i tried to run it through whisky it straight up did not work. like it wouldnt open or anything, meanwhile pretty much every other game did.. at least my other vns, which is what i was comparing it to. anyways i chalked up the reason to be that: because it had a compatible mac version, the windows one wouldnt run on my mac despite using the compatibility layer and everything. This made logical sense to me!... but there was no way for me to access the mac version of MAMIYA without the mac version of steam.
so i downloaded the mac version of steam. at this point i had both mac steam and windows steam running. It is still fucking wild to me that there are different ones but yeah. i download MAMIYA again and it actually boots up! i think "holy shitballs what an incredible trick if i can run mac games and windows games with two steams" NO!!! NO IT DOESNT WORK! YOU CANT HAVE TWO STEAMS!!!!! "why are there two steams in the first place"IDK. I DONT KNOW MAN. As soon as i ran mac steam the windows one lost internet connection. Yep it just fully did not work. loaded up and everything, but couldnt access the store or my account and was fully offline. I was so fucking pissed off. obviously if i have to choose between shitty mac steam that only has 3 fucking games and my goated windows compatibility layer steam....... as soon as i deleted the mac steam from the computer the other one started working again. I still have no idea why this even happened. but yeah in case anyone ever wants to run two versions of steam at the same time.. you cant.
Windows in bottles
I ended up abandoning UTM at this point because a fun thing you can do with whisky is actually change the locale that windows is running in a specific bottle. or rather, it actually automatically figures out what locale is needed to run that program inside each "bottle" (which is just a mini windows fileset. you make a new one each time you want to run a new program) so when i wanted to run my vn files, which do need a japanese locale due to unicode issues that i discussed here, i could just run them through whisky as a new bottle with their own windows specifications and it would work completely fine!! so i didnt need the virtual machine at all! lamento, lemure's blue 2am, and dmmd all ran completely fine or well at least they opened to the title screen and a couple lines of story which is all i needed haha. now back to the original programming::
i knew that some games didnt work on whisky, reasons related to whatever is in the most recent wine version or aforementioned extra silly stuff that would make the game run smoother. i did not really think that sf6 would be one of these games and well it was lol. I was like fully heartbroken because at this point i had gotten EVERYTHING ELSE to run!! even my yaoi from 2006 like come on what the fuck! so we went back to reddit and they said i needed to use crossover. Crossover? the paaaaiiiiidddddddd compatibility layer? that does functionally the exact same thing as whisky but just better? knowing that sf6 was probably the only game i even had that wouldnt run? YES! crossover of 74$ fame. Luckily they have a free trial. but this is where everything started to go wrong anew.
Crossing Over
obviously i was kind of upset that i had retrace all my steps despite whisky working fine just because of this one game. But i really badly wanted to play street fighter so i thought it was worth it. and if it ended up working then i could just have crossover instead of whisky since it's supposed to be a better compatibility layer anyways yk? the 74$ part of the equation was not yet called into play since i did find a free trial extender for it on github. and i also just didnt know if it would work yet.
to download crossover and have it work i figured i would need to uninstall whisky, fine that makes sense right? though probably now in hindsight im realizing that. i could just choose which compatibility layer to load the file to and its not like one would fuck up the other idk. WHATEVER. point being i uninstalled whisky the best i could. of course i did something wrong and uninstalled wine, i was trying to get rid of everything whisky related and bc whisky is literally just a way to use wine for some reason this program called wine64-preloader refused to shut off. so ok i uninstalled it? and downloaded crossover free trial successfully.
I literally have to reinstall my steam games and run them through crossover now though since i deleted whisky. fascinatingly MAMIYA runs through crossover and not whisky, probably because it is a very new game and requires the latest wine version. but now.. moment of truth and i download sf6!!
It doesnt work lmfao. But this isnt a crossover issue this is a gpu issue and at this point im too fucking boggled to try and look up whats wrong with my gpu like i dont care man. it is clearly not going to work and now, i have crossover free trial even though whisky was working completely fine, and it was all pointless. the logical next step for me here was to try and find a bit of solace by redownloading whisky and at least return to my previous point where my visual novels could work with no issue right? RIGHT....??????? wrong. Ohhh did i fucking mess up lol.
Wine
remember how i said i fucking deleted wine when i tried to uninstall whisky? when i reinstalled it. whisky hits me with this message that they cant open the bottles because file wine64 does not exist. aka the file i literally purged off my macbook. im not that dumb so the solution here is to reinstall wine, and then it should be able to work! hahahaha..... wouldn't it be so easy if you could install wine? why do you think people made crossover and whisky in the first place.. oh right.....
so that U dont have to worry about. Literally typing commands into terminal omg//
lmfao. terminal is a silly little way for you to communicate directly with the operating system by inputting commands. mostly just for developers and freaks who try to run shit like linux.. or freaks who try to run raw wine without an easy package like crossover/whisky. turns out now im a freak like that. on the wine website there are a few different ways for you to install it, but it really is not so easy as just downloading and opening a file. in order to get wine you need to use homebrew which is a software that lets u download extra stuff onto ur mac (or linux becuause im in some freak shit now) that apple wouldnt allow. or something. anyways here i am typing the homebrew input into terminal so it can download:
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
and then downloading wine....
brew cask install wine-stable
now shouldnt all be well? now that i have wine back on my puter whisky should run and everything should be fine? NO! because whisky still isnt running because wine64 still is not there. what the heck! i was able to figure out that getting wine64 was as simple as typing in an upgrade command to wine in terminal, but like. this all just comes down to my original fuckup with uninstalling whisky. In hindsight if i had just focused on properly uninstalling every file then i wouldnt even need to try downloading wine seperately..... but anyways.. in this process i did try to run a couple games through wine itself and it worked.
Now i am thinking to myself atp whats the use of whisky??? i ended up doing everything i didnt want to do in the first place: using wine raw, inputting code into the os, perusing through my hidden files in finder.. come on. Oh yeah so finder is just the mac version of file manager except not everything is shown to you off the bat, like /User and the more specific files for each application you have downloaded. in the app library the "applications" are really just file packages and you can click "see package information" or something like that to see every file inside it. To get to the /User files you need to do cmd+shift+H within finder itself.
and that is how i was able to go find every file i didnt originally uninstall for whisky, and thus correct my mistakes.. and start from the beginning to reinstall whisky. Theres no point in me going in depth to my adventures through my fucking files its just like it was literally 1am and i was delirious so that is also why despite me having already figured out wine, i just wanted to redownload whisky and make this whole process easier. like im stupid and it IS easier lol.
Wtf
after all that i ended up just keeping my old laptop anyways because i really couldnt run sf6 at all. and like. this is a lot of fucking work!!!1 Yes i messed up SEVERAL. times but. its still a lot... it is a lot to learn and a lot to figure out especially if you are prone to messing up and you need to troubleshoot. it was worth it for me, because i can still play my visual novels and thats like? the most casual for me so i would want it on my laptop even if i use it for school/work the rest of the time. But for stuff like sf6, hades, ff7, probably guilty gear as well.. idk. at that poiint its like what are we even doing. U need to question what you really want out of the machine, if u want to play street fighter then literally use anything besides a macbook! i figured this out the hard way!!!
and like let me just say this thing is really good at everything besides running games lol. I got kinda into the coding shit towards the end there and macos is intuitive enough once you figure it out. its a lot of figuring stuff out but ya lol. I mean r/macgaming will have people talking abt elden ring, baldurs gate, etc. and yeah its possible, crossover isnt hard to use either.. but i would only say to put yourself through that if you have no other choice. ultimately if u do have another windows puter available it really does make the most sense to use that one for gaming. yes stuff works on mac, it runs, but it's just not meant for this? Ah well that's just my experience. the macgaming reddit is full of apple dickriders who refuse to admit that their favorite tech company doesnt give a fuck about them or making games viable despite all this with game porting toolkit (which i didnt even talk about here). u will get downvoted to oblivion for saying to some poor guy who wants to run baldurs gate on his m1 that it makes more sense to buy a gaming laptop than suffer. Just use a fucking windows lol.
EDIT ive returned to using utm my visual novels dont work via whisky, theyll load but not run
resources
in case anyone reading this has a real interest in doing this themselves (why) and also for myself in the future:
https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/1edc2hm/guide_to_mac_gaming_for_beginners/ (this is a much more in depth post about the exact same things i talked about here, also going into graphics apis and translation layers and more stuff that was not really relevant to well. me running visual novels from the early 2000s.. but if you want to play freaking elden ring lol)
https://www.davidbaumgold.com/tutorials/wine-mac/
https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/16mz6rd/game_porting_toolkit_a_bit_of_confusion/
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6530671?sortBy=rank
https://www.winehq.org/
https://wiki.winehq.org/MacOS
https://brew.sh/
https://docs.getwhisky.app/guide.html
https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/