Install Windows software on your Mac without the need for a virtual machine, an emulator or dual-booting. Wineskin is a Mac app that brings Wine to your Mac, OS X style, allowing you to create custom packages including everything your favorite Windows programs need to run on your Mac (well. Many of your favorite Windows programs). Wineskin is a tool used to make ports of Windows software to Mac OS X. The ports are in the form of normal Mac application bundle wrappers. It works like a wrapper around the Windows software, and you can share just the wrappers if you choose.
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Most games from the Windows-era of PC gaming (as in, pre-modern/pre-Steam-era, or roughly 1995-2005) can be run on Intel Macs (Macs made after ~2006) thanks to a compatibility layer called Wine. Years ago it was called “Windows Emulator,” but later it became Wine Is Not An Emulator. And it’s not – it doesn’t translate instructions, it just translates functions (“system calls”) from Windows to POSIX, which they call a “wrapper” (wraps the Windows software to intercept its Windows API calls). Even though it’s technically not an emulator, it fits the theme of this blog. Here’s a walkthrough.
Wine itself is a command-line program, installable via MacPorts. But you wouldn’t want to run it that way. So there are a couple of different choices for GUI front-ends.
- WineBottler, which is the easier option to use and has a nicer looking UI, but doesn’t support using different versions of Wine per application, which you might find helpful for older games that can run on Windows 95 but crash on XP.
- Wineskin Winery. Sometimes referred to as just “Wineskin” or just “Winery.” The UI is very unfriendly, but does offer a little more configurability than WineBottler, and doesn’t have any donation-begging, nor do you have to suffer through ads in order to download it like you do with WineBottler.
Here we’ll go through an example with Wineskin Winery.
- When you launch Winery, you pretty much just have an empty window with the option to download and install an “engine,” which is the underlying version of Wine that will be used to create a compatibility “wrapper” for a particular game. Clicking the ‘+’ button, the choices (as of the time of this writing) include one called WS9Wine1.7.30. But what you want to do is ‘Download and Install’ one of these engines, probably the newest one.
- This should return you to the main menu, whereupon you have to click ‘Update’ under ‘Wrapper Version’ if it still says ‘No Wrapper Installed.’ Winery confuses the user by referring to the wrapper-generator component as the “Wrapper” – no, the wrapper is what you as the user are expected to create. Anyway, hit that update button.
- Now, finally, the ‘Create New Blank Wrapper’ button should be activated.
- Obtain a copy of a Windows game. I’ll use a silly imported Japanese game (for Windows 95; released 1996) as our example here. I have a folder of files for the game that includes an EXE and some other stuff.
- In Winery, click “Create New Blank Wrapper” and give it a name, which will create a Mac OS X app bundle by the same name (e.g., “MyCoolSoftware.app”) at the end. During creation of the wrapper/app bundle, you might be asked to install Mono for .NET games or Gecko for games with browser components. For some games these might be unnecessary, but the fastest way to know is trial & error. Even without the additional components, the resulting empty wrapper is a whopping 166MB.
- If you double-click on ~/Applications/Wineskin/MyCoolSoftware.app, you might expect the application to launch. Nope! Mac OS X complains that it cannot be run. And yet if you attempt to run it a second time, it works and you will now be presented with wrapper options. This seems like a bug, but that’s how it goes.
- In the panel that appears, you must click ‘Install Software,’ even if the game is self-contained and doesn’t need an installer step. In our case, because we suspect the EXE we have is the game itself rather than the installer, we choose ‘Copy Folder Inside’ to make a copy of the game within MyCoolSoftware.app. Taking a guess, we select GAMENAME.EXE in its top folder, as the executable that will start our program.
- Now you can double-click the MyCoolSoftware.app in Finder, to launch your game.
Starting up our game, we see a title screen and a couple notes of music! Then, it crashes. A Windows dialog pop up for “encountered a serious error” appears, and we are forced out of the program. All we can tell from this is that the failure happened when the program tried to read an address that it couldn’t.
If this happens, one possible solution is to go to the Wine HQ application compatibility database and search for the game, or for the publisher, or the original Japanese title, or even the original developer. In my case, nothing returned any results.
It turned out that in my case, it was a bug in the game itself – an incompatibility with Windows XP. It supposedly worked in Windows 95, but not in later versions of Windows. While you can configure Wine to report the OS version as Windows 95, that was no help in this case. Neither was switching to a much older Wine engine. Luckily, there was a patched version of the EXE for the game with XP support, so I changed the wrapper to point to the fixed EXE, and I was good to go. Because Wine “emulates” Windows XP, in rare cases like this you’ll have to first find a way to make the game XP-compatible.
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Latest Version:PPSSPP 1.6.3 LATEST
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Requirements:Mac OS X 10.7 or later
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Author / Product:PPSSPP Team / PPSSPP for Mac
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Old Versions:
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Filename:ppssppbuildbot-org.ppsspp.ppsspp-dev-latest-osx-fat.zip
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Details:PPSSPP for Mac 2020 full offline installer setup for Mac
![Psp Psp](/uploads/1/2/3/7/123759274/656497468.png)
PPSSPP is the first PSP emulator for Android (and other mobile platforms), and also runs faster than any other on Windows, Linux and macOS. PPSSPP for macOS is in its early stages and game compatibility is thus still somewhat spotty.
Enhance your experience!
- Play in HD resolutions and more
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- Crank up the anisotropic filtering and texture scaling
- Continue where you left off by transferring saves from your real PSP
Also Available: Download PPSSPP for Windows
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