This tutorial won't be ultra-comprehensive, but rather a quick start guide designed to get you up and running Windows Games fast as possible. The video version of this includes a bit more info and demos of games running.

You've probably heard about Apple's Game Porting Toolkit also known as GPTK, a utility design to porting Direct X based games to Mac, and it happens to have the ability to run Windows games on the Mac. This process originally required installing a bunch of tools via the command-line and it wasn't stream lined. Now it is, thanks to apps like Whiskey. This app is 100% free and it's caveat is it was designed only to work with DirectX 11 and 12.

Requirements

Installation


After downloading Whiskey, Double click it and then it will prompt you to install Rosetta 2, a translation technology by Apple that allows Macs with Apple Silicon processors to run software designed for x86 and GPKT (Game Porting Toolkit). The total will be be over 400 MBs.


Click create New Bottle. Just for context, GPTK uses WINE, and WINE bottles are self-contained environments that allow Windows applications to run on non-Windows operating systems. You can choose where the WINE Bottle will be installed on your Mac (this is where the windows games will be installed, if you want to use an external drive, you can).

From the Whisky interace, click open C drive. Then Drag the SteamSetup.exe into the drive_c folder.

Now go back to Whiskey and click Run and select the SteamSetup. You'll step through the steam setup as if it were a normal PC.

From here you can install games as you normally would. Just be aware sometimes important dialog boxes can be hidden behind the steam application.

Game Compatibility

It's important to understand many older titles are unlikely to work for multiple reasons such as:

  • The game is not Direct X 11 or Direct 12
  • AVX instructions which Rosetta
  • Anti-cheat Software
  • Unsual copy protection
  • Certain types of online features

There isn't a comprehensive list of compatible titles, the best place to check is AppleGamingWiki and look under GPTK compatibility. Also, Whisky has a small Game Support Wiki for running particular titles.