macOS Classic Gaming in 2025

Why play classic games on macOS?

I have an Apple Silicon CPU MBP, and I love playing classic and indie games. I also have a beefy PC gaming rig, but trying to be eco-friendly, I try to play everything possible in the least power-hungry device (the laptop). Using an intel i9 (with the E-Cores disabled) to run an ancient MS-DOS title gives me the heebie-jeebies.

Native options

Surprisingly, quite a few Steam and GOG games work out of the box under macOS. Same as I use the Steam main desktop application, I like to use GOG Galaxy, which automatically filters out incompatible titles from my library.

Running incompatible games

In the case of Steam, some of the titles that steam warns "probably won't work" or that are 32 bit titles, actually do work. Most likely due to the magic of Rosetta 2.

In the case of GOG, however... if it is incompatible, there are two main choices:

• If the game is an MS-DOS title, you can manually run DOSBOX, adjust the configuration, and probably fix it.
• If it is a Windows title, you're out of luck.

Or so I thought... until I did some research and found about Porting Kit: A Wine fork for macOS that enables plenty of Windows titles to run, including some fairly recent titles. I've tried a few games, and I can confirm that they work as good as Wine under Linux did for me in the past. Note that games running via this method might contain issues, and those with anti-cheat systems probably won't run. You can find more details about Porting Kit at applegamingwiki.com

Source Ports

Some games either have published their source code, or have been fully reverse engineered. While a few include either macOS binaries, most simply provide instructions to compile them. If you want to avoid having to install all the extra tooling just to enjoy e.g. a good Quake gaming session, Mac Source Ports provides you with those native builds with the latest versions available.

Virtual Machines as an option

There's a final, more drastic approach to emulating: VMs, virtual machines. Windows on ARM has an excellent compatibility layer for x64 titles. I have a virtualized Windows 11 Home image that I run through VMWare Workstation Pro (free for personal use), and it works very well for indie titles like Oxygen Not Included and other Unity3D engine titles. With the proper tweaks and optimizations, I can play a few otherwise macOS incompatible titles without issues.

Conclusion & Links

While not every game works, and for triple-A titles I am not even interested in finding out, playing classic videogames on macOS is a capable alternative, almost at the level of Linux with Wine.

I added the links mentioned in this post to my macOS cheatsheet page.