Mac News: Wine / Game Porting ToolKit?

[ThaOGDreamWeaver]

For those of you not interested in selling a kidney for Daft Punk casual magic ski goggles, there was another anno at WDCC23.

 

Apple are repackaging Wine into an officially-sanctioned Game Porting Toolkit - but adding DX12 support for Apple silicon (M1 and up).  

 

Here's the kit:

https://github.com/apple/homebrew-apple/tree/main/Formula

 

...and some basic instructional videos to go with it.

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10123/

 

Early experiments posted to Twitter and socials seem surprisingly good - including someone running a stable Cyberpunk 2077 in Ultra Mode.

(And yes, having CP77 stable at all is an achievement in itself 😁)

 

Was wondering if this is something any of our community might care to have a hack at?

Edited June 7, 2023 by ThaOGDreamWeaver

[WanderingAries]

My only concern is whether this is available only to Mac App Store apps or in general as if it's the former, then we'll be about 10 versions of MacOS too early for a 'legal' app.

[ThaOGDreamWeaver]

I think it's in general as it's free on GitHub, and seems to use Wine kit as a baseplate. 

[Ago]

On 6/7/2023 at 3:02 PM, WanderingAries said:

My only concern is whether this is available only to Mac App Store apps or in general as if it's the former, then we'll be about 10 versions of MacOS too early for a 'legal' app.

I wouldn't worry too much about App Store lock in, there's quite a few apps on Mac that refuse to be listed on App Store for something as simple as revenue cut (Discord, Spotify and many other apps rely on .dmg's for that reason alone.  They don't want Apple to take X% of whatever subscriptions they sell monthly.)  As long as that continues to occur, Apple can't entirely restrict games from being made outside of their walled garden.  The other canaries in the coal mine would have to face that change first.

 

On 6/8/2023 at 4:26 AM, ThaOGDreamWeaver said:

I think it's in general as it's free on GitHub, and seems to use Wine kit as a baseplate. 

 

The Wine part of the toolkit is meant to speed up development, nothing more.  The toolkit itself isn't a magic wand to add Metal to a thing, the game runs on Wine to get direct feedback instead of making a port from scratch and running it break-fix until they get a usable result.  There's nothing in the toolkit for an end user (namely, us the players) to make City of Heroes perform any better than just using the existing HCLauncher installation which right now includes the same version of Wine.

 

Commenting on development as a player only, that is as far as I can go.  I'd be guessing as much as any of you are on that part.  On Apple's plans, however... Ars Technica says it better than I can. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/with-macos-sonoma-intel-macs-are-still-getting-fewer-updates-than-they-used-to/ Three Scenarios for the TL;DR or "I hate paywalls" peeps, which is totally understandable (Gonna ignore the Mac Pro in the below, which isn't really a consumer-facing device) :

Scenario 1. MacOS 15: 2019/2020 Intel Macs only. 2018 and prior are cut off with a similar cadence from prior releases. This is the most likely outcome. The sales of 2020 Intel Macs dropped like a comet once M1 was announced. Little reason not to bundle those release years together.

Scenario 2. MacOS 15 ends all Intel Support, with MacOS 14 being the last OS they can run to get security updates until Fall of 2026. Aggressive, but not impossible.  The last Intel Macs that were sold new (as late as 2021) are not likely to be a tremendous lot of people.

Scenario 3. MacOS 15 has the same requirements as Sonoma, keeping 2018 Intel Macs on life support for one more year.  A peace offering that may make consumers happier as five years of updates before "becoming vintage" still happens. (Least likely, though.)

 

Safe bet: MacOS 16 is likely the release where Intel Macs fall to security-only updates from prior OS releases in entirety.

 

My point? Rosetta 2 then, if history repeats itself, would end software support on MacOS 17 or 18.

 

They can't kill App Support before the OS Support ends, and unlike Rosetta, Intel systems sold at a far higher volume than PowerPC, and the Apple Userbase then vs. now is much larger.  That might weigh in to the decision.  Also, Rosetta 1 was an IBM product that was licensed to Apple for the PowerPC transition, so there was a cost benefit to ending that offering earlier than later.  This time, it's their baby.  Rosetta 2 is entirely in-house.

That's all just a possibility to keep in mind.  Conjecture on my part.  The takeaway?

-- None of this should dissuade people buying one now, other than "I don't like Apple," or "I want a real video card, not integrated." (Both are fair.)

-- Hardware Transition may be complete, but Apple can't finish the Software Transition as quickly without a lot of blowback.  (Even telling folks in late 2020 about the transition, Intel Mac users expect a regular and fair support timeline.)
 

-- Ignoring all of the above, Homebrew devs patching future MacOS releases to keep running Rosetta 2 on supported hardware (M1-M5ish) isn't far fetched, either.  Or Asahi Linux may add it to their repertoire out of a lucky breakthrough.  (It currently works on VMs of Linux in MacOS with some prep work in a Host/Guest OS pairing.)  There's time for both to happen. 

Edited July 17, 2023 by Tock
Added Ars link to possible Intel Mac's "Software End of Life".