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?
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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
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!
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The 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.
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How do you play your Windows games on Mac?
Let us know in the comment below!
Updated October 2019: Updated with the best options.
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Fishing timeC.J.'s next Fishing Tourney will be in July
There are four Fishing Tourneys each year in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Here's when they are and what the rules are for participating.
These days most apps on your Mac are easy to understand. You can even use Launchpad to manage — and delete — them like iPad apps. Sometimes, though, they still don't work the way iOS apps do. For example, if you want to delete an app, but it doesn't have an X when you trigger jiggle mode, or when you try to delete it old-school style in Finder, you get a message that reads, 'The item '[app name]' can't be moved to the trash because it's open.'
It happens because the app is still processing in the background and, for one reason or another, that background process has failed to properly shut down. Cue all the cursing! Or, better yet, read on and I'll show you how to shut it down and get it gone for good!
Note: I used the Rocket app as an example in my pictures, but only because I was removing an earlier version. I love Rocket and would never delete it (it emojifies your Mac!).
How to close an app that you thought was already closed or can't figure out how to close on your Mac
- Click on the Finder icon in your app dock.
Select Applications from the Favorites list.
- Scroll down and double-click on Utilities.
Double-click on Activity Monitor.
You can also just type 'Activity Monitor' into Spotlight.
- Type the name of the app you are looking for into the Search bar.
- Select the app.
- Click on the X in the upper left corner of the window.
- Click Quit to confirm that you want to quit the process.
The app is now closed and you can delete it from your Mac.
Any questions?
Are you still having trouble closing or deleting an app on your Mac? Ask away and we'll help you out.
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C.J.'s next Fishing Tourney will be in July
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There are four Fishing Tourneys each year in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Here's when they are and what the rules are for participating.