game-porting-toolkit.md

How to install game-porting-toolkit (aka proton for macOS)

You also might wanna just use Whisky which does this automatically

This guide works on macOS 13.4+ using Command Line Tools for XCode 15 Beta!

What is this?

In the recent WWDC, Apple announced and released the "game porting toolkit", which upon further inspection this is just a modified version of CrossOver's fork of wine which is a "compatibility layer" that allows you to run Windows applications on macOS and Linux.

Why would I want this?

Playing Windows games on MacOS

How?

First, install homebrew which is an amazing macOS package manager, which is weirdly enough what Apple themselves have used for distrobution of this program

brew tap apple/homebrew-apple

This adds apple's offical "repository" for their "forumula" (package), which includes the game-porting-toolkit

AArch64 (ARM, Apple's chips, not x86_64/Intel)

Make sure that rosetta2 is installed

/usr/sbin/softwareupdate --install-rosetta --agree-to-license

homebrew to inside Rosetta

arch -x86_64 zsh
cd /usr/local && mkdir homebrew
curl -L github.com/Homebrew/brew/tarball/master | tar xz --strip 1 -C homebrew

arch -x86_64 /usr/local/homebrew/bin/brew tap apple/homebrew-apple
arch -x86_64 /usr/local/homebrew/bin/brew install game-porting-toolkit

Now, you can install the game-porting-toolkit

Warning: This will take a LONG TIME, and will use up a LOT of system resources because it needs to compile a really large project (LLVM)

brew install game-porting-toolkit

Then, go to this url (on apple.com) to download the actual toolkit, place it somewhere memorable.

How do I use it?

First, you need to create a "wine prefix" for your game.

To do this,

WINEPREFIX=~/my-game-prefix `brew --prefix game-porting-toolkit`/bin/wine64 winecfg

Where you would replace my-game-prefix with whatever you want you want it to be.

You should now change (in the window that pops up) the windows version to "windows 10"

Press ok, and then install your game into my-game-prefix

Finally, to install apple's game porting toolkit, use

ditto [REPLACE THIS WITH WHEREVER YOU PUT THE GAME PORTING TOOLKIT]/lib/ `brew --prefix game-porting-toolkit`/lib/

and finally, to run the executable,

[REPLACE THIS WITH WHEREVER YOU PUT THE GAME PORTING TOOLKIT]/gameportingtoolkit ~/my-game-prefix 'C:\\Program Files\\MyGame\\MyGame.exe'

or, for without the debug GUI

[REPLACE THIS WITH WHEREVER YOU PUT THE GAME PORTING TOOLKIT]/gameportingtoolkit-no-hud ~/my-game-prefix 'C:\\Program Files\\MyGame\\MyGame.exe'

Integration into Steam

TODO

I'm having trouble understanding what's going on. If someone can help me I'd be very thankful.

So I followed the steps under "Evaluation Environment for Windows"'s readme to the exception of a small change:

After doing brew install apple/apple/game-porting-toolkit I got an error mentioning [email protected] was no longer supported. Therefore I ended up looking and installed rbenv's [email protected] which fixed it (rbenv/tap/[email protected])

After the command finished running I couldn't work out the WINEPREFIX=~/macPorts brew --prefix game-porting-toolkit/bin/wine64 winecfg command because... There was no bin directory under /usr/local/opt/game-porting-toolkit and therefore no wine64 binary.

Has anyone experienced this and ended up fixing it? Copying and pasting another wine64 binary from WineHQ did not work as it expects to find ntdll.so which does not exist on the Apple's Game Porting Toolkit that was provided.

UPDATE

In the meanwhile, I was giving it another go (completely reinstalling brew) and I noticed these errors:

• Firstly, there were a few errors regarding brew link to a few font packages until I got an error regarding Permissions denied @ dir_s_mkdir - /usr/local/etc/fonts/conf.d
• So I tried again and then got these ones:

checking build system type... x86_64-apple-darwin24.2.0
checking host system type... x86_64-apple-darwin24.2.0
checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... yes
checking for gcc... /usr/local/opt/game-porting-toolkit-compiler/bin/clang
checking whether the C compiler works... no
configure: error: in `/private/tmp/game-porting-toolkit-20250101-89666-h2k7e/wine64-build':
configure: error: C compiler cannot create executables

In the end, it seems there's a problem with the C compiler and that's the reason I have no binaries. However, I'm not sure on how to proceed.

UPDATE

More context: I tried installing the following Command Line Tools for XCode but to no avail:

• 16
• 16.2
• 15.3

Any version prior to 16 returns some sort of too old of a version error. With 16.X I get the error from before.

hi @sirj0k3r I have been experiencing the same error that the c compiler is not working while installing apple/apple/game-porting-toolkit. Actually, i have installed successfully the gptk by gcenx repo, which provides one app just called Game Porting toolkit, the 1.1 version, and it seems to be considered as one cask which can run some exe applications but the Steam and Battle.net failed to install, very similar to directly use Whisky but I have not tried to use crossover. Now I do believe that it caused by the xcode version issues but I also received the too old version issues as well, the version 15.1 mentioned by the official Apple's readme.rtf was not working, very suspicious of its effectiveness.

################################################################################
#                           Game Porting Toolkit                               #
################################################################################

 Welcome to wine-7.7 (Game Porting Toolkit 1.1).

 In order to start a program:
   .exe: wine64 program.exe
   .msi: wine64 msiexec /i program.msi

 If you want to configure wine:
   wine64 winecfg

 To get information about app compatibility:
   appdb Program Name

/private/tmp/game-porting-toolkit-20250314-34870-yw7x5l/wine/configure --prefix=/usr/local/Cellar/game-porting-toolkit/1.1 --disable-win16 --disable-tests --without-x --without-pulse --without-dbus --without-inotify --without-alsa --without-capi --without-oss --without-udev --without-krb5 --enable-win64 --with-gnutls --with-freetype --with-gstreamer CC=/usr/local/opt/game-porting-toolkit-compiler/bin/clang CXX=/usr/local/opt/game-porting-toolkit-compiler/bin/clang++
checking build system type... x86_64-apple-darwin24.2.0
checking host system type... x86_64-apple-darwin24.2.0
checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... yes
checking for gcc... /usr/local/opt/game-porting-toolkit-compiler/bin/clang
checking whether the C compiler works... no
configure: error: in `/private/tmp/game-porting-toolkit-20250314-34870-yw7x5l/wine64-build':
configure: error: C compiler cannot create executables
See `config.log' for more details

==> Formula
Tap: apple/apple
Path: /usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Taps/apple/homebrew-apple/Formula/game-porting-toolkit.rb
==> Configuration
HOMEBREW_VERSION: 4.4.24
ORIGIN: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew
HEAD: 2f6db3757e6c8533750264c0d397c3671665e2f4
Last commit: 4 days ago
Branch: stable
Core tap JSON: 14 Mar 02:24 UTC
Core cask tap JSON: 14 Mar 02:24 UTC
HOMEBREW_PREFIX: /usr/local
HOMEBREW_CASK_OPTS: []
HOMEBREW_MAKE_JOBS: 12
Homebrew Ruby: 3.3.7 => /usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Homebrew/vendor/portable-ruby/3.3.7/bin/ruby
CPU: dodeca-core 64-bit westmere
Clang: 16.0.0 build 1600
Git: 2.39.5 => /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin/git
Curl: 8.7.1 => /usr/bin/curl
macOS: 15.2-x86_64
CLT: 16.2.0.0.1.1733547573
Xcode: 16.0
Rosetta 2: true

Not sure this helps anyone running into issues, but I've been running the game porting toolkit and Windows Steam plus several Windows Steam games on my MacBook Pro M4 Max for many months with no issues. However, I followed @domschl directions (not sure they are different) on his page: https://github.com/domschl/WinSteamOnMac
I also note he is now recommending running Asahi Linux but I don't see M3 or M4 chips being supported right now and installing it can brick your Mac!

You could try AGPT - I'm not affiliated with them but this worked for me without Brew.