VMware Fusion: Powerfully Simple Virtual Machines for Mac. VMware Fusion gives Mac users the power to run Windows on Mac along with hundreds of other operating systems side by side with Mac applications, without rebooting. Fusion is simple enough for home users and powerful enough for IT professionals, developers and businesses. Aug 10, 2015 Open the VirtualBox app and click on the New button to create a new virtual machine. Give the machine a name (which should be the name of the distro). Then, enter the amount of RAM you want to allocate to the virtual machine. Now you have to create virtual hard drive for the system; I would suggest VDI format. Oct 29, 2019 In the end, programs like the ones listed above aren't the most reliable way to play Windows games on your Mac, but they do give you an option. Of course, another option is to run Windows on your Mac, via BootCamp or a virtual machine, which takes a little know-how and a lot of memory space on your Mac's hard drive.
The Mac has plenty of games, but it'll always get the short end of the stick compared to Windows. If you want to play the latest games on your Mac, you have no choice but to install Windows ... or do you?
There are a few ways you can play Windows games on your Mac without having to dedicate a partition to Boot Camp or giving away vast amounts of hard drive space to a virtual machine app like VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop. Here are a few other options for playing Windows games on your Mac without the hassle or expense of having to install Windows.
GeForce Now
PC gaming on Mac? Yes you can, thanks to Nvidia's GeForce Now. The service allows users to play PC games from Steam or Battle.net on macOS devices. Better still, the graphic power of these games resides on Nvidia's servers. The biggest drawback: the service remains in beta, and there's been no announcement when the first full release is coming or what a monthly subscription will cost.
For now, at least, the service is free to try and enjoy. All supported GeForce NOW titles work on Macs, and yes, there are plenty of them already available!
The Wine Project
The Mac isn't the only computer whose users have wanted to run software designed for Windows. More than 20 years ago, a project was started to enable Windows software to work on POSIX-compliant operating systems like Linux. It's called The Wine Project, and the effort continues to this day. OS X is POSIX-compliant, too (it's Unix underneath all of Apple's gleam, after all), so Wine will run on the Mac also.
Wine is a recursive acronym that stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator. It's been around the Unix world for a very long time, and because OS X is a Unix-based operating system, it works on the Mac too.
As the name suggests, Wine isn't an emulator. The easiest way to think about it is as a compatibility layer that translates Windows Application Programming Interface (API) calls into something that the Mac can understand. So when a game says 'draw a square on the screen,' the Mac does what it's told.
You can use straight-up Wine if you're technically minded. It isn't for the faint of heart, although there are instructions online, and some kind souls have set up tutorials, which you can find using Google. Wine doesn't work with all games, so your best bet is for you to start searching for which games you'd like to play and whether anyone has instructions to get it working on the Mac using Wine.
Note: At the time of this writing, The Wine Project does not support macOS 10.15 Catalina.
CrossOver Mac
CodeWeavers took some of the sting out of Wine by making a Wine-derived app called CrossOver Mac. CrossOver Mac is Wine with specialized Mac support. Like Wine, it's a Windows compatibility layer for the Mac that enables some games to run.
CodeWeavers has modified the source code to Wine, made some improvements to configuration to make it easier, and provided support for their product, so you shouldn't be out in the cold if you have trouble getting things to run.
My experience with CrossOver — like Wine — is somewhat hit or miss. Its list of actual supported games is pretty small. Many other unsupported games do, in fact work — the CrossOver community has many notes about what to do or how to get them to work, which are referenced by the installation program. Still, if you're more comfortable with an app that's supported by a company, CrossOver may be worth a try. What's more, a free trial is available for download, so you won't be on the hook to pay anything to give it a shot.
Boxer
Virtual Machine On Mac For Gaming Windows 10
If you're an old-school gamer and have a hankering to play DOS-based PC games on your Mac, you may have good luck with Boxer. Boxer is a straight-up emulator designed especially for the Mac, which makes it possible to run DOS games without having to do any configuring, installing extra software, or messing around in the Mac Terminal app.
With Boxer, you can drag and drop CD-ROMs (or disk images) from the DOS games you'd like to play. It also wraps them into self-contained 'game boxes' to make them easy to play in the future and gives you a clean interface to find the games you have installed.
Boxer is built using DOSBox, a DOS emulation project that gets a lot of use over at GOG.com, a commercial game download service that houses hundreds of older PC games that work with the Mac. So if you've ever downloaded a GOG.com game that works using DOSBox, you'll have a basic idea of what to expect.
Some final thoughts
In the end, programs like the ones listed above aren't the most reliable way to play Windows games on your Mac, but they do give you an option.
Of course, another option is to run Windows on your Mac, via BootCamp or a virtual machine, which takes a little know-how and a lot of memory space on your Mac's hard drive.
How do you play your Windows games on Mac?
Let us know in the comment below!
Updated October 2019: Updated with the best options.
We may earn a commission for purchases using our links. Learn more.
Fishing timeC.J.'s next Fishing Tourney will be in July
There are four Fishing Tourneys each year in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Here's when they are and what the rules are for participating.
You may wonder what’s wrong with this fellow (meaning me, the author). Has he completely lost his mind when he proposes a Linux virtual gaming machine? Before you discredit the idea, let me explain.
Windows virtual gaming machine
Here and elsewhere Linux users run their Microsoft Windows OS as a virtual machine on Linux and pass through a dedicated GPU. Given the right configuration, this “Windows virtual gaming machine” will have little to no performance penalty compared to a native (bare metal) Windows installation.
Using KVM and GPU passthrough allows users to play graphic intensive games inside a virtual machine (VM) by using a dedicated GPU for the Windows VM. Typically you assign the IGD or internal graphics device (inside the CPU) to the host and the (powerful) discrete graphics card to the Windows VM.
The IGD or a low-power GPU will handle the less demanding jobs of web surfing, video/movie display and a whole bunch of productivity tasks just fine.
But what if you wish to play a game under Linux? Numerous Linux-based games available today already have higher demands on the graphics device.
Single GPU passthrough
One approach is to make the (powerful) discrete GPU available to Linux/Xorg. The most common approach is “single GPU passthrough”, and several tutorials have focused on that subject. Single GPU passthrough uses one graphics card for the Linux host, which is passed through to the Windows VM when needed. When the Windows VM is shutdown, a program or script resets the graphics card and re-attaches it to the Linux host. As simple as it sounds, this approach has it’s downsides:
- The graphics card must be reset before it can be used by another windows manager/OS – some cards behave better than others;
- After booting the VM, the Linux host will no longer have a graphics device, so one cannot switch back and forth between the two;
- Single GPU passthrough and the way a graphics card is attached to Xorg is still a little experimental.
Yuri, who has written a script and tutorial for single GPU passthrough, writes:
In one command it kills X, frees the GPU from drivers and console, detaches the GPU from the host, starts the VM with the GPU, waits until the VM is off, reattaches the GPU to the host and starts lightdm.
As you can see, there are a lot of things to consider. Also consider what might happen when a Windows VM crashes? Will the graphics card reattach itself to the host? Chances are it won’t.
Linux gaming VM
Assume you already have a Windows VM with VGA passthrough (i.e. a Windows gaming VM). The steps to create a Linux gaming VM are simple. You can literally use your existing Windows VM configuration, make some slight alterations, create a virtual image, and in no time you have a Linux gaming VM using your powerful discrete graphics card.
The process for creating a Linux gaming VM is described in Installing a Linux Mint 19 (Ubuntu 18.04) VM with VGA Passthrough.
Here the benefits of this approach:
- Your host system and Windows VM remain untouched – no downtime of host system nor availability of Windows VM!
- Conserve energy – use the low-power IGD while performing normal tasks;
- Easy to backup/restore linux.img file that holds the entire Linux VM;
- Create a slim gaming VM with all your games installed.
As disk space is cheap – even for SSD – I can’t see a reason not to run a 30GB-50GB Linux virtual gaming machine.
I look forward to read your comments.
Conclusion
16 months have gone since I wrote the above. In the meantime I created several passthrough VMs running different distros. Sharing files between VMs or host and VM is simple – just create a Samba share on the host. Performance is lightning fast and only limited by the SSD.
In fact, sharing host resources such as a printer has not been an issue at all. Right now I’m running a Manjaro Linux VM for a long term test to see if it fits my needs as the future host OS on a new PC.
I remote mounted my host-side music library folder on my Linux VM using an fstab entry like this:
//myhostname.local/music/flac /home/myuser/Music/ cifs user=myuser,password=xxxxxx,iocharset=utf8,noperm,noauto,x-systemd.automount,nofail 0 0
Above is a quick and dirty way to make host folders available to a VM. A better way is described in How To Use SSHFS to Mount Remote File Systems Over SSH.
I use the ALSA sound system to channel the sound through the host to an Asus Xonar Essence PCI sound card. The Xonar sound card feeds a really enjoyable audiophile system (amp and speakers). What can I say – the music is crystal clear with excellent definition of musical instruments and singers. After several hours of critical listening I cannot hear a difference between playing the music on the host or in the VM. I will do some more listening since this is of critical importance to me.
I still have to run some graphics tests and will update here.
Virtual Machine On Mac For Gaming Windows 10
So far I’m happy with this solution – the Linux VMs I’ve run so far perform remarkably good. In fact, the out-of-the-box experience with Linux is better than with Windows. Even multiple updates don’t mess up the system nor the performance.