How to play Windows games on your Mac without Windows

Source: iMore

The Mac has plenty of games, but it’ll always get the short end of the stick compared to Windows. If you want to play the latest games on your Mac, you have no choice but to install Windows . or do you?

There are a few ways you can play Windows games on your Mac without having to dedicate a partition to Boot Camp or giving away vast amounts of hard drive space to a virtual machine app like VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop. Here are a few other options for playing Windows games on your Mac without the hassle or expense of having to install Windows.

GeForce Now

Source: Nvidia

PC gaming on Mac? Yes you can, thanks to Nvidia’s GeForce Now. The service allows users to play PC games from Steam or Battle.net on macOS devices. Better still, the graphic power of these games resides on Nvidia’s servers. The biggest drawback: the service remains in beta, and there’s been no announcement when the first full release is coming or what a monthly subscription will cost.

For now, at least, the service is free to try and enjoy. All supported GeForce NOW titles work on Macs, and yes, there are plenty of them already available!

The Wine Project

Source: Wine Project

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

Wine is a recursive acronym that stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator. 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.

As the name suggests, Wine isn’t an emulator. 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. So when a game says «draw a square on the screen,» the Mac does what it’s told.

You can use straight-up Wine if you’re technically minded. 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. 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.

Note: At the time of this writing, The Wine Project does not support macOS 10.15 Catalina.

CrossOver Mac

CodeWeavers took some of the sting out of Wine by making a Wine-derived app called CrossOver Mac. CrossOver Mac is Wine with specialized Mac support. Like Wine, it’s a Windows compatibility layer for the Mac that enables some games to run.

CodeWeavers 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.

My experience with CrossOver — like Wine — is somewhat hit or miss. Its list of actual supported games is pretty small. 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. Still, if you’re more comfortable with an app that’s supported by a company, CrossOver may be worth a try. 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.

Boxer

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. Boxer is a straight-up emulator designed especially for the Mac, which makes it possible to run DOS games without having to do any configuring, installing extra software, or messing around in the Mac Terminal app.

With Boxer, you can drag and drop CD-ROMs (or disk images) from the DOS games you’d like to play. It also wraps them into self-contained «game boxes» to make them easy to play in the future and gives you a clean interface to find the games you have installed.

Boxer is built using DOSBox, a DOS emulation project that gets a lot of use over at GOG.com, a commercial game download service that houses hundreds of older PC games that work with the Mac. So if you’ve ever downloaded a GOG.com game that works using DOSBox, you’ll have a basic idea of what to expect.

Some final thoughts

In the end, programs like the ones listed above aren’t the most reliable way to play Windows games on your Mac, but they do give you an option.

Of course, another option is to run Windows on your Mac, via BootCamp or a virtual machine, which takes a little know-how and a lot of memory space on your Mac’s hard drive.

How do you play your Windows games on Mac?

Let us know in the comment below!

Updated October 2019: Updated with the best options.

We may earn a commission for purchases using our links. Learn more.

Rumor: Apple TV app coming to Sky Q in the UK

A new rumor on Reddit claims the Apple TV app may be coming to Sky Q in the UK.

Apple’s App Store ‘breaking at the seams’, says former marketing director

Apple’s former Sr. Director of Worldwide Product Marketing, Michael Gartenberg, says he hopes Apple «gets its act together soon» in the face of growing reports regarding scam apps on its App Store, which he says appears to be «breaking at the seams».

Review: Charge faster with OtterBox’s 30W Fast Charge Wall Charging Kit

With 30 watts of power, this charging kit will charge your iPad Pro and other devices faster than ever. It automatically adjusts the charging speed for your particular device.

Protect your new iPad with these great cases

Keep your new 10.2-inch iPad in mint condition with these fantastic cases! From keyboards to protection, there are so many options.

The 5 Best Ways to Run Windows on Your Mac

Find out which option best fits you

While macOS is made to run using Mac hardware, it is not the only operating system that can run on a Mac computer.

Plenty of other operating systems, including Window and Linux, will work on a Mac device. That makes the Mac among the most versatile computers you can buy. Here’s what we’d use to install Windows on a Mac.

Boot Camp

Supports Windows 7, 8.1, and 10

Windows runs natively on Mac hardware for best performance

Requires a full Windows license for the initial install.

Cannot run Windows and Mac OS concurrently.

Perhaps the best-known option for running Windows on a Mac is Boot Camp. Included free with your Mac, Boot Camp allows you to install Windows and then choose between Mac and Windows on startup.

Because Boot Camp runs Windows directly on your Mac’s hardware (there is no virtualization or emulation to be performed) Windows can run at the best possible speed your Mac is able to deliver.

Installing Windows on your Mac is no more difficult than installing Windows on a PC. Apple even provides the Boot Camp Assistant to partition the startup drive to make room for Windows as well as to install all the drivers Windows needs for special Apple hardware.

Virtualization

Run both macOS and a guest OS side-by-side.

Not limited to Windows; a large number of guest operating systems are supported.

Performance tuning and customization needed to achieve the best performance.

May impact the performance of your Mac.

Virtualization allows several operating systems to run on computer hardware at the same time. Virtualization abstracts the hardware layer, making it look like each operating system has its own processor, RAM, graphics, and storage.

Virtualization on the Mac makes use of a software layer called a hypervisor to emulate all of the underlying hardware. As a result, the guest operating system running on the virtual machine does not run as fast as in Boot Camp. But unlike Boot Camp, both the Mac operating system and the guest operating system run at the same time.

There are three primary virtualization apps for Mac:

• Parallels: The first to bring virtualization to the Mac. Parallels supports a wide range of guest OS, including Windows, Linux, and Mac.
• VMWare Fusion: Fusion is the Mac virtualization app offered by VMWare — a leader in virtualization tech. Fusion supports the installation of many different operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and macOS.
• VirtualBox: Oracle supports an open source virtualization app known as VirtualBox. This free virtualization app runs on multiple computer systems, including Mac. Like the other virtualization apps, VirtualBox can be used to run many different operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and macOS.

Installing the virtualization apps is similar to any other Mac app. Guest OS may be more involved with some customization required to obtain the best performance. All three apps have lively forums and support services to help with tuning the performance.

How to run Windows programs on Mac for free

Both Windows PC and Mac have certain captivating features that make users hard to choose between two. If you have been a Window user for a long time switching to Mac is never easy. Although Mac may take the edge when it comes to aesthetics, Windows is way ahead in the way it handles software & games. If you are a die-hard fan of Windows machine but have switched to Mac, you may have to face few inconveniences occasionally. Mac doesn’t support to run Windows exclusive apps, but if you have programs on Mac that are compatible only with Windows, you may have to find a possible way to run Windows programs on your Mac.

Fortunately, there are some solutions that allow you to run programs that support only Windows. Thanks to the options like Remote Access, Wine Bottler, Boot Camp, and Virtual machines – they allow you to run Windows-only apps and software on Mac for free.

Run Windows Programs on Mac

The following solutions will help you run Windows exclusive PC games and software on Mac:

1. Remote Access
2. Wine Bottler
3. Boot Camp
4. Virtual Machines.

In this article, we overview the different ways to run Windows software on Mac.

1. Remote Access

If you have both Mac and Windows machine, you can make use of remote desktop to access files, software and other apps on Windows PC from your Mac. There are many free tools like TeamViewer and Remote desktop for Mac that would allow you to access Windows machine from your Mac. Additionally, if you are Chrome user, you can access Windows PC having Chrome from your Mac’s Chrome using Chrome Remote Desktop. These remote access tools allow you to easily set up remote access to your Windows PC. To use this, all you need to do is configure the remote desktop on both your machines and sign-in to your accounts to connect both the PCs whenever you desire.

2. Wine

Wine is helpful if you have a small number of Windows programs to run on Mac. It is a free tool that allows you to run small programs easily on a Mac with a single click. It doesn’t require any installation. Wine is an open-source program, and it doesn’t require any Window license to run Windows apps on the different operating system. To use this tool simply download .exe files and open it with Wine tool to run the programs directly on Mac. The tool rewrites the code to allow applications to run on different operating systems. Hence it may not work for all the software. The tool is not ideal for some Windows software, but it is useful if as some apps may crash, but it does work perfectly well for few applications. Wine is mostly used with third-party tools like Wine Bottler or Wineskin to build a convenience interface. Get this tool here.

3. Boot Camp

If your work requires you to switch between Mac and Windows, Apple’s Boot Camp comes in handy. Boot Camp allows you to install Windows on your Mac machine. This is similar to dual-booting Linux on Windows machine. Apple’s Boot Camp lets you run Windows and Mac side by side on a single machine. Boot Camp partitions your hard drive so that you can install Windows and reboot it whenever needed. Boot Camp doesn’t allow you to run both the Windows and Mac programs simultaneously. You need to restart your current program in order to reboot the other. That is why Boot Camp is ideal for running Windows PC games or other software as the Windows can utilize the entire machine resources. However, it doesn’t allow you to run Windows and Mac OS applications side by side simultaneously.

4. Virtual Machine

Unlike Bootcamp, Virtual machine allows you to run both Windows programs and Mac programs side by side at the same time without rebooting your machine. It is one of the popular ways to run windows program on Mac, and it enables to install Windows OS on your Mac desktop. To run Windows as a Virtual OS, you will need a Windows license to install Windows on a Virtual machine. Window users who already have a product key can install the Windows installation media for free and use it in a Virtual machine program. Mac offers Parallels, Virtual Box, and VMware Fusion as virtual machine programs. One downside of Virtual Machine is that it consumes a lot of resources to keep the VM running without difficulty.