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Whisky: Wine supercharged with the power of Apple's game porting toolkit
- littlecranky67 3y agoI prefer Heroic Game Launcher. It detects GPTK if installed and compiled via homebrew, but also has a built in downloader for different wine binaries (crossover or verbatim wine). You can set each wine runtime for each game. Plus, Heroic can login and download your Epic and GoG games.
- jonny_eh 3y agoWhat about Steam?
- littlecranky67 3y agoDoesn't support steam to my knowledge, that's where Whisky comes in handy.
- ShamelessC 3y agoSounds like you don't really "prefer" it so much as you don't have any need for it, but would indeed use it if you were a Steam user. That correct?
- littlecranky67 3y agoProbably correct, I am a steam user of course but I always prefer to buy games on GoG (because of the DRM-free situation). And possibly because a lot of my steam games already run on Mac natively.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Philpax 3y agoPretty neat, but will Apple attempt to shut this down for redistributing GPTK?
- kouteiheika 3y agoI doubt it. But they will shut it down eventually, purely by dropping support for Rosetta.
- sgjohnson 3y agoWhat does this have to do with Rosetta?
- asow92 3y agoDoesn't GPTK depend on Rosetta?
- BirAdam 3y agoAll x86 software being run on macOS relies on Rosetta 2. It effectively does a translation of x86 binaries to ARM binaries. Then, WINE handles the PE to mach-o translation along with providing a system call translation from Windows to *nix. Game porting toolkit then adds in macOS specific stuff as well as Vulkan and DirectX translation to Metal.
- giomasce 3y agoVulkan? Are you sure? Last time I checked it was just only Direct 3D. For Vulkan there is only MoltenVK.
- hmottestad 3y agoMost games don’t have an ARM version yet, so Rosetta lets you play x86 games.
- mod50ack 3y agoI'm unsure that they'd actually do this. As I recall, the original Rosetta required Apple to pay royalties to IBM and it was basically only useful for Mac OS X binary compatibility. Being able to translate x86 binaries is somewhat more general in application and I don't think Apple is paying royalties on Rosetta 2.
- BaculumMeumEst 3y agothese projects are assaulting my sobriety
- als0 3y ago[flagged]
- hmottestad 3y agoWhat games have you tried?
- als0 3y agoGames from over 20 years ago that work well with Wine on other platforms: - Morrowind doesn't start after the launcher. - Manhunt runs at 5 FPS. Five! - Oddworld: Abe's Odyssey doesn't start - Deus Ex is too slow to be playable - Jet Set Radio doesn't start - Half-Life Blue Shift works well
- shortrounddev2 3y agoWhen was the last time you tried? It's gotten a lot better since I first tried it (probably like 15 years ago)
- als0 3y agoAll of those today, about an hour ago. As I said, they work fine with Wine on Linux but not with Wine/Whisky on the Mac.
- Pesthuf 3y agoThat’s my experience too. It looks like some modern games that are 64 bit and use DX12 and thus game porting toolkit‘s dx2metal work quite okay, but 32 bit DirectX<11 games run particularly awfully. And I’m running what the community has dubbed the best way, crossover with cxpatcher.
- skrrtww 3y agoFor Morrowind you should use OpenMW https://openmw.org/downloads/ https://openmw.org/downloads/ The rule of thumb is generally that for Windows games pre-2008ish, Parallels is a better choice, since they tend to rely on weird corners of Windows compatibility and 32-bit performance in Wine is still not always great. DXVK + MoltenVK is generally the best choice for anything post-2000s, pre-DX11, and GPT/D3DM is generally the best choice for anything DX11/DX12.
- wyre 3y agoThis seems cool but I can't help but think it should be named Brandy since brandy is distilled wine and whisky is something different.
- lessbergstein 3y agoFortified wine or Thunderbird would be a more accurate simile, I think
- Avelina10 3y ago[dead]
- jug 3y agoI would love to see a table with level of support and framerate for a few CPU's here. I know it depends on contributions but I think the community would be happy to do so if this takes off.
- cpuguy83 3y agor/macgaming has had a number of these. Personally I've had very little luck getting much of anything to work, though.
- karimf 3y agoI've been following the scene of Mac gaming for a while. Isaac, the author of this project, is someone who contributes a lot to this space. He created Whisky and contributed to Ryujinx, a Switch emulator that works on Mac, and Playcover, a way to play iOS apps and games on Mac. Also, he's still 17 years old. [0] [0] https://isaacmarovitz.com/ https://isaacmarovitz.com/
- Eric_WVGG 3y agoThis is a tiny detail but boy do I appreciate that he actually bothered to use the real toolkit (AppKit, SwiftUI, whatever) for the GUI… I am so, so tired of projects like Docker Desktop that cram basic UI's into Electron and think that's somehow "fine." Thank you, Isaac. The details matter.
- viktorcode 3y agoIf you target latest macOS that's an easy choice.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- saagarjha 3y agoUsing AppKit to support older versions of macOS is not particularly difficult.
- karulont 3y agoHow is this different from CrossOver?
- hmottestad 3y agoIt’s just an easy way to get started with GPTK. Crossover has support for GPTK now too, so you can use that if you want.
- irusensei 3y agoDidt things got better lately? I had very limited success with crossover circa 2021. And that's from a point of view from someone who have no Windows actively running on personal devices. Comparing to what I get in my Linux AMD GPU machine crossover seems to be not as good.
- hmottestad 3y agoCrossOver now supports the GPTK, which lets you run DX12 games.
- dev_tty01 3y agoDoes Crossover use the native Mac interface tools?
- mrpippy 3y agoYes, it’s entirely AppKit.
- danaris 3y agoThey have a handy-dandy little comparison table on their Wiki. [0] [0] https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky/wiki/A-Hitchhiker's-Guide-to-Whisky#whisky-or-crossover https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky/wiki/A-Hitchhiker's-Gui...
- runxel 3y agoThe Apple Gaming thing is the only thing that keeps me tempting to switch to Sonoma, even tho the rest of it is so bad and worth it.
- rtuin 3y agoInteresting developments in this space. So how does this work in practice? Do I feed it an ISO? Are Steam games supported?
- bestest 3y agowhisky does run steam but in my particular case, trying to download a game, it stops at 2%. and that's it. it does not seem to happen with crossover.
- als0 3y agoSteam games are sadly very hit and miss. In my case more misses than hits.
- ShamelessC 3y agoYeah. I hesitate to be harsh on a volunteer project. It’s clearly got a lot of brilliance behind it. But yeah, all the games I tried today failed to run unfortunately. On the other hand, the Steam launcher itself somehow runs faster via Whisky than the native Mac version.
- ankaAr 3y agoWine for apple and they called it whisky? Cider should be the name.
- esquivalience 3y agoWine, fortified with the power of porting? I should say Port was a perfect name.
- Moldoteck 3y agoPortwein?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tapoxi 3y agoCider was the name of a commercial port of Wine to Mac by a company called Transgaming.
- ankaAr 3y ago:c
- nzgrover 3y agobeer => whiskey wine => brandy
- isaacryu 3y agoQuite a few projects already with Cider as their name, so I decided against it.
- honeybadger1 3y agoI am pretty pleased with it. It has its own set of nuances, but it is simple and works quite well with my needs so far.
- herpdyderp 3y agoNeat but... how do I use it? (Currently I'm clicking random things until something interesting happens.) edit: found a guide on the GitHub repo: https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky/wiki/A-Hitchhiker's-Guide-to-Whisky https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky/wiki/A-Hitchhiker's-Gui...
- hmottestad 3y agoDownload the windows exe file for Steam and run it from the run button in your flask.
- herpdyderp 3y agoThanks, that's even easier than what I was initially trying (force downloading Windows games via the Steam CLI on the Mac side)
- amelius 3y agoWhy don't we ever get the opposite? I want this but a MacOS emulator (really a library implementing the MacOS apis), so Mine, not Wine. Allowing me to e.g. run Safari on Linux.
- ori_b 3y agohttps://www.darlinghq.org/ https://www.darlinghq.org/ Needs people to contribute to get to the point of running Safari, but the foundation is there.
- garciasn 3y agoSomeday! “…we finally have basic experimental support for running simple graphical applications.” But not yet.
- amelius 3y agoYeah, I know I shouldn't complain but I've lost faith in this project.
- philistine 3y agoThe work is impressive, but I don't see a future where anyone manages to stay ahead of Apple and emulates macOS. Wine has decades of work, tons of support from companies with a vested interest in its success, and a clear need (running Windows games on Linux and Mac, running Office et al. on Linux). I am an inveterate macOS user and I don't see any benefit to a project like this for Linux. Who wants the very high quality third-party software made for the Mac, but not the OS? There's way too few people with this werid mindset to make a project of this scope viable.
- sandworm101 3y ago>> wants the very high quality third-party software made for the Mac, but not the OS? Everyone who wants to do video editing on a Linux box. Or, in other words, everyone who doesn't want to buy and maintain a $$$$ apple machine just for occasional video editing. The same people who don't want to keep windows boxes running just because one random client needs them to use some random Windows only software
- hmottestad 3y agoI’ve been using Whisky for a month or so to play Hogwarts Legacy on my M1 Max. Lots of fun. Performance is fine. The M1 Max is definitely not a 4090, but it’s nice that I can play the game at all!
- MrBuddyCasino 3y agoHow many FPS do you get?
- okamiueru 3y agoFrom a quick search suggesting somewhat relevant results: - Using AMD FSR 2 to upscale a 1280x720 render target to 1080p, and all graphic presets set to low they benchmarked ~42 FPS on M1 Pro and 47 FPS on M1 Max. Around the same ish ballpark as with a GTX 700 series dedicated GPU, released 10 years ago. And around twice the performance of other integrated graphics of other modern CPUs.
- derrasterpunkt 3y agoThere are multiple translation layers in between the game and the GPU. I don’t think this is a fair comparison.
- okamiueru 3y agoIndeed. I think I only mentioned it because of the original reference to it not being a RTX 4090, with a somewhat adjusted perspective of what performance it is closer to.
- hmottestad 3y agoAt those settings I'm getting about 40 fps. If I bump it up to ultra I get about 32 fps. If I go for retina (2304x1490 upscaled to 3456x2234) I'm down to 25fps, and when I step inside a building I get around 33fps.
- 3y ago
- shmerl 3y ago[flagged]
- jbverschoor 3y agoIt's good to realize that the Xbox design uses virtual machines. Every game is its own VM, with its own OS.
- jbverschoor 3y agoCheck out this interview with Dave Cutler by Dave Plummer: https://youtu.be/xi1Lq79mLeE?si=9Gh0G-zFh0hX89cA&t=7394 https://youtu.be/xi1Lq79mLeE?si=9Gh0G-zFh0hX89cA&t=7394 (from 02:03:00) Oh, and if someone can lipread, the audio mutes at 02:06:55 :-)
- hypercube33 3y agoIve wondered for a while why (yes I know, piracy and security) we can't get Xbox subsystem for windows
- atorodius 3y agoCan someone familir with the scene comment on how this compares eith Crossover?
- tomaskafka 3y agoAfaik it has a one-version-behind (to still let crossover have some edge and ger money that lets them develop it further) crossover inside.
- solardev 3y agoMuch props to the maintainers for making this available at all, but I gotta say that as a user (gamer), the experience is a pain. Some games work, sort of, after a lot of configuration (often with outdated instructions, https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky/wiki/Game-Support https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky/wiki/Game-Support. Many games don't work at all, or only work on some platforms (e.g. Battle.net but not Steam for Diablo 4). Dozens of issues remain unaddressed: https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky/issues https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky/issues I wish Apple would hire a team to properly maintain this, the way Valve has done with Proton and Steam Deck Verified. In the meantime, I find that GeForce Now (https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/) provides a much more seamless, one-click-and-play experience. It works every time and doesn't break on every update, etc. Its primary downside (aside from a very reasonable monthly subscription fee) is that it has a relatively small game library, with only a subset of Steam/Epic/Xbox title available to play. But of the games it supports, it provides an overwhelmingly better experience than Whisky, GPT, or even native Apple Silicon gaming. The 4080 is dramatically more powerful than even the highest end Mac, and running it in the cloud means no local noise or heat, and much much better battery life. For anyone interested in actually gaming on a Mac without headaches, with good graphics and a good framerate, I'd strongly recommend GFN and just ignoring the ports or emulation layers. It's just a much better experience.
- derrasterpunkt 3y ago>I wish Apple would hire a team to properly maintain this, the way Valve has done with Proton and Steam Deck Verified. Valve cooperated with Codeweavers, the makers of Crossover, to build Proton. And afaik Apple „works“ with Codeweavers. Well at least they don‘t get in the way to incorporate GPTK into Crossover. Apple changed the licence of GPTK so that Codeweavers can include GPTK.
- solardev 3y agoGood point! Have you had any experience with CrossOver? Does it tend to work better than Whisky? Part of the nuance here is that although both can use GPT underneath, there's still a lot of config that needs to happen beforehand (e.g. different "sync" modes that impact not just visual fidelity, but whether the game will even launch at all). Does CrossOver take care of all that for you (with predefined pre-game profiles, perhaps) or do you still have to manually configure every title?
- littlecranky67 3y agoSince a few weeks I've been using the cheapest base model Mac Mini M2 which I got from a major german retailer for 650€ (all taxes included) brand-new. The gaming capabilities on 1080p are amazing and surprised me. I don't think there is any comparable WIntel machine for that price available (and within same form factor) with comparable gaming performance - mostly because available iGPUs are not powerful enough. I can see how that will change with the release of the new AMD Phoenix Desktop APUs, but we will have to wait if vendors bundle it into this slick, quiet, neat-looking machine that is the Mac Mini. Downside is of course, you have to mess with GPTK and Heroic/Whiskey, the UX is not nearly as slick as Steam+Proton on Linux. I hope GPTK is just Apples first foray into gaming, they could release a trimmed-down version (less ports, no ethernet, no speaker) of a Mac Mini with a gaming focus and compete with PS5/Xbox on the price. But it needs better software UX for gaming just like Proton did for Linux.
- virtualritz 3y ago> I don't think there is any comparable WIntel machine for that price available (and within same form factor) with comparable gaming performance [...] Check the Xiaomi RedmiBook Pros. You'd be surprised.
- littlecranky67 3y agoThere are actually some devices that could complete on paper specs, like the Beelink GTR7 or other small form-factors. Problem is, they are made by some chinese manufacturers, and even though Xiami is not a small company, the build quality can vary, and availability is completely random. Especially the Beelink one with the AMD 7840 chips seems to be vaporware - there were youtubers and magazines reviewing it a couple of month back, but I was unable to find a retailer that actually has it, and it seems to have gone away from the homepage. They are also probably not very big on support and returns.
- gtirloni 3y ago> I was unable to find a retailer that actually has it, All these Chinese manufacturers are on AliExpress. There are many offers for Beelink SER7 with AMD 7840 chips.
- cactusplant7374 3y agoDoes this trigger any virus alerts?
- isaacryu 3y agoThere is a known false positive involving Avast https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky/issues/465#issuecomment-1742176499 https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky/issues/465#issuecomment...
- mcfedr 3y agoJust found this a few days ago, looks like a nice start, but less developed (so far) than some of the others. I landed on Wineskin for my usage (playing AoE2) as i found it most understandable. Also check out Porting Kit for click and play.
- harrygeez 3y agoThe other thing is Wineskin using CrossOver as its main engine now performs so much better than vanilla wine.
- mcfedr 3y agoYea and it offers a newer crossover build than whiskey, not sure why whiskey isn't using the latest open source version available
- lippihom 3y agoI for the life of me cannot get AoE2 to run on my M1. Somehow always desyncs and/or jitters.
- mcfedr 3y agoI'm running definitive edition from steam on my M2, works great, using Wineskin with dxvk
- reimertz 3y agoI just tested it and it ran CS2 at 120fps on online servers. All I had to do was install Steam, then installed CS2 on Steam and ran the game. mind blown that we can get this type of performance knowing how many hops are involved to get this to work (Rosetta2, DirectX -> Metal etc). I hope these type of things give AAA studios the motivation to check out Apple Game Porting Toolkit.