Apple Tries to Bring More Windows PC Games to Mac With New Toolkit
Windows remains the top platform for PC games, but Apple is trying to change that with a new toolkit designed to help developers quickly bring their PC titles to the macOS platform.
At WWDC, the company introduced(Opens in a new window) a Game Porting Toolkit, which promises to streamline the process of translating a Windows or even console title to macOS.
It can typically take a developer numerous steps merely to see and test their game on a different OS. To address this, the toolkit includes an emulator that can run a Windows game on a Mac. “This lets you analyze your game’s potential performance immediately, eliminating months of upfront work,” Apple director Brandon Corey said in a session(Opens in a new window) at WWDC.
Interestingly, a screenshot shows the emulator can also run Microsoft’s DirectX12, which is often used in high-end Windows PC titles, but hasn’t been natively available for Macs. In another WWDC session(Opens in a new window), Apple demoed the developers of the game, The Medium, using the emulator to run a DirectX12 Window build of their horror title on a Mac.
Hence, the emulator is raising questions over whether it can be used beyond testing purposes and become an official way to run Windows PC games on a Mac, as pointed out by Andrew Tsai(Opens in a new window), the founder of PCGamingWiki. This would be similar to how Valve’s Linux-based Steam Deck can also run Windows games, thanks to the Proton translation layer.
It also looks like Apple built the emulator based on open-source computer code from CodeWeavers, the company behind Wine and CrossOver, two projects that can run Windows apps on macOS. In a press release, CodeWeavers said(Opens in a new window): "We are ecstatic that Apple chose to
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