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Game Porting Toolkit

From AppleGamingWiki, the wiki about gaming on M1 Apple silicon Macs
Revision as of 06:38, 8 June 2023 by Andytizer (talk | contribs)

Game Porting Toolkit is Apple's new translation layer which combines Wine with Apple's own D3DMetal which supports DirectX 9-12. Games that use anti-cheat or aggressive DRM generally don't work. Games that require AVX CPUs also do not work e.g. Last of Us.

Working games:

  • Halo 3 (MCC - No Online due to Easy Anti-Cheat Compatibility)
  • Cyberpunk 2077
  • Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade (~50 FPS on High settings at 1080p with M1 Pro)
  • God of War (Works somewhat well on M1 Pro (16gb), wouldn't recommend lesser hardware.)
  • Elden Ring
  • SpongeBob SquarePants: The Cosmic Shake
  • Diablo IV [1]
  • Hogwarts Legacy
  • Deep Rock Galactic
  • Sonic Omens
  • Sonic P-06
  • Scarlet Nexus
  • Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
  • Dyson Sphere Program (some objects and main character weren't visible before)
  • Derail Valley (awesome performance, no missing manuals - in-game objects for train operation - like on CrossOver)
  • Spider-Man (2018)
  • Spider-Man Miles Morales - requires Windows ver fix
  • Warframe - To get installer/launcher working add dwrite (disabled) to library overrides in winecfg
  • HI-Fi RUSH
  • QUBE 2
  • Deceive Inc. - works well if launched without EAC
  • Risk of Rain 2 (does not require `-disable-gpu-skinning` like Crossover 22)
  • Crysis Remastered
  • Cuphead
  • Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

Not working well:

  • Horizon Zero Dawn - slowdown issues

Not working yet:

  • Hitman 3 - launcher works, crash at 0x0000014136dddd hitman3+0x136dddd: int $3
  • Among Us
  • Tiny Tina's Wonderlands - Intro videos play, dragon animation indicating shader precompilation starts, game freezes, eventually crashes.
  • Halo Infinite - Crash on launch
  • Many (all?) DX9 games
    • 30XX - "Failed to create D3D device" -> crash on launch; this is a rare 64-bit DX9 game
    • Left 4 Dead 2 - Black screen -> crash on launch
    • Killing Floor 1 - Crash on launch
    • Sonic Mania - Crash on launch
    • Mega Man Zero/ZX Legacy Collection - "Failed to create d3d9 device" -> crash on launch

Toolkit install instructions

Requirements

  • macOS Sonoma should be used, currently it is in beta. You can download the pkg installer from Mr Macintosh blog.
  • macOS Ventura causes large numbers of issues with steamwebhelper.exe crashing so it isn't recommended, use the macOS Sonoma beta.
  • Visit Apple Developer Downloads site, these files are now free to download use for any logged in Apple account.
    • Search for Command Line Tools for Xcode 15 beta and download the dmg file, then install it.
    • If you have an old version Xcode installed, remove it.
    • Search for Game Porting Toolkit and download it. Open the dmg file and then run the pkg.

Homebrew

Note: if you have ever installed Homebrew before, then it is advisable to remove arm64 Homebrew as this can interfere with this build process. Either use a Homebrew uninstall script or delete the folder /opt/homebrew/bin. Otherwise, if you prefer to keep both arm64 and x86 versions of brew installed, you may add a "brew-switcher" to your .zshrc file to allow either version to be used depending on the active architecture. You may follow the steps at the end of this section after installing Brew to achieve this.

Open Terminal (search in Spotlight on macOS).

Install Rosetta:

softwareupdate --install-rosetta

Enter an x86_64 shell to continue the following steps in a Rosetta environment. All subsequent commands should be run within this shell.

arch -x86_64 zsh

Install the x86_64 version of Homebrew if you don't already have it.

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Make sure the brew command is on your path:

which brew

If this command does not print /usr/local/bin/brew, you should use this command:

export PATH=/usr/local/bin:${PATH}

(Optional) If you want to have both arm64 and x86 versions of Brew installed, begin by editing your .zshrc file:

nano ~/.zshrc

Scroll down (by using the arrow keys or Control + V) to the bottom of the file, and paste the following script:

if [ "$(arch)" = "arm64" ]; then
    eval "$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)"
else
    eval "$(/usr/local/bin/brew shellenv)"
fi

You may now restart your terminal and use the following command to return to an x86_64 shell:

arch -x86_64 zsh

Your shell will now select the right installation of Brew, depending on your architecture.

Build

Run this command to download Apple tap:

brew tap apple/apple http://github.com/apple/homebrew-apple

Install the game-porting-toolkit formula. This formula downloads and compiles several large software projects. How long this takes will depend on the speed of your computer. It can take over 1 hour to complete depending on the speed of your Mac.

brew -v install apple/apple/game-porting-toolkit

If during installation you see an error such as “Error: game-porting-toolkit: unknown or unsupported macOS version: :dunno”, your version of Homebrew doesn’t have macOS Sonoma support. Update to the latest version of Homebrew and try again.

brew update brew -v install apple/apple/game-porting-toolkit

Wine prefix

A Wine prefix contains a virtual C: drive. You will install the toolkit and your game into this virtual C: drive. Run the following command to create a new Wine prefix named my-game-prefix in your home directory.

WINEPREFIX=~/my-game-prefix `brew --prefix game-porting-toolkit`/bin/wine64 winecfg
  • A “Wine configuration” window should appear on your screen.
  • Change the version of Windows to Windows 10.
  • Choose Apply and then OK to exit winecfg.

If the “Wine configuration” window does not appear, and no new icon appears in the Dock, verify that you have correctly installed the x86_64 version of Homebrew as well as the game-porting-toolkit formula.

Preparing the toolkit

Make sure the Game Porting Toolkit dmg downloaded earlier is mounted at /Volumes/Game Porting Toolkit-1.0. Use this script to copy the Game Porting Toolkit library directory into Wine’s library directory.

ditto /Volumes/Game\ Porting\ Toolkit-1.0/lib/ `brew --prefix game-porting-toolkit`/lib/

Put the 3 scripts from the Game Porting Toolkit DMG into here /usr/local/bin using this command:

cp /Volumes/Game\ Porting\ Toolkit*/gameportingtoolkit* /usr/local/bin

Steam install

Download the Windows version of Steam and place in your Downloads folder.

Install Steam

gameportingtoolkit ~/my-game-prefix ~/Downloads/SteamSetup.exe

Run Steam

gameportingtoolkit ~/my-game-prefix 'C:\Program Files (x86)/Steam/steam.exe'

Log into Steam A common issue is that Steam will present with a blank black window.

Alternate way of launching Steam (after installing):

MTL_HUD_ENABLED=1 WINEESYNC=1 WINEPREFIX=~/my-game-prefix /usr/local/Cellar/game-porting-toolkit/1.0/bin/wine64 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steam.exe'

If this continues then close the Terminal window and then re-open and try again, repeat until the login screen opens. Now you should be able to download and launch Windows games through Steam.

Battle.net install

Download the Windows version of Battle.net.

Make a new Wineprefix for Battle.net - we will refer to this as battle-net from now:

WINEPREFIX=~/battle-net `brew --prefix game-porting-toolkit`/bin/wine64 winecfg
  • A “Wine configuration” window should appear on your screen.
  • Change the version of Windows to Windows 10.
  • Choose Apply and then OK to exit winecfg.

Run Battle.net launcher

gameportingtoolkit ~/battle-net ~/Downloads/Battle.net-Setup.exe

Be aware that there is an issue launching Battle.net once installed, the only current way to re-login is to 'install' the launcher again.

Start individual game without the launcher using this command:

arch -x86_64 gameportingtoolkit-no-hud ~/battle-net 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Diablo IV\Diablo IV Launcher.exe'

Launching individual game

Open your Wine prefix’s virtual C: drive in Finder (open ~/my-game-prefix/drive_c) and copy your game into an appropriate subdirectory.

A. Standard launching

gameportingtoolkit ~/my-game-prefix 'C:\Program Files\MyGame\MyGame.exe'

This launches the given Windows game binary with a visible extended Metal Performance HUD and filters logging to output from the Game Porting Toolkit.

B. Launching without a HUD

gameportingtoolkit-no-hud ~/my-game-prefix 'C:\Program Files\MyGame\MyGame.exe'

C. Launching with Wine ESYNC disabled

gameportingtoolkit-no-esync ~/my-game-prefix 'C:\Program Files\MyGame\MyGame.exe'

Logging

The provided bin/gameportingtoolkit* scripts can be copied onto your path to facilitate different forms of logging and launching. You can run these scripts from any shell; you don’t need to switch to the Rosetta environment first.

Logging output will appear in the Terminal window in which you launch your game as well as the system log, which can be viewed with the Console app found in Applications ▸ Utilities. Log messages from the Game Porting Toolkit are prefixed with D3DM. By default the gameportingtoolkit* scripts will filter to just the D3DM-prefixed messages.

Troubleshooting

Steam login black screen

Close the Terminal window and then reopen and retry the command, repeat several times.

Alternate way of launching Steam (after installing):

MTL_HUD_ENABLED=1 WINEESYNC=1 WINEPREFIX=<path to the Wine bottle you set up> /usr/local/Cellar/game-porting-toolkit/1.0/bin/wine64 'C:\Program Files (x86)/Steam/steam.exe'

If still not working then try using CrossOver and create a Steam bottle, then redirect this WINEPREFIX to that bottle:

WINEPREFIX="/Users/[username]/Library/Application Support/CrossOver/Bottles/Steam/" 

Steam crashes straight after opening

Disconnect any external monitors.

Battle.net launcher won't re-launch

Re-install the launcher to reopen, no other fix at the moment.

My game won’t run because it thinks the version of Windows is too old. Some games detect specific minimum versions of Windows and need to be updated. Use this script to update your wineprefix with build 19042 which should work for most games e.g. Spider-Man Remastered.

WINEPREFIX=~/my-game-prefix `brew --prefix game-porting-toolkit`/bin/wine64 reg add 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion' /v CurrentBuild /t REG_SZ /d 19042 /f
WINEPREFIX=~/my-game-prefix `brew --prefix game-porting-toolkit`/bin/wine64 reg add 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion' /v CurrentBuildNumber /t REG_SZ /d 19042 /f
WINEPREFIX=~/my-game-prefix `brew --prefix game-porting-toolkit`/bin/wineserver -k

steamwebhelper.exe crashes

This is caused by Steam being run through macOS Ventura or below, upgrade to macOS Sonoma.

My game won't run and crashes with an invalid instruction

Invalid instruction crashes are often (but not always) caused when Rosetta 2 is unable to translate AVX/AVX2 instructions. You may be able to recompile a version of your game without AVX/AVX2 instructions in order to evaluate its potential on Apple Silicon with the Game Porting Toolkit when you hit this error. When porting your code natively to Apple Silicon, NEON instructions are a high-performance replacement for AVX/AVX2.

My game won't run because its anti-cheat or DRM software is incompatible with Wine translation.

You may be able to rebuild a custom version of your game in your Windows development environment with anti-cheat or DRM disabled for your own evaluation purposes. When porting your code natively to Apple Silicon and macOS, contact your anti-cheat or DRM provider—most have native Apple Silicon solutions for your native build.

My game won’t run because it requires Mono, .NET, or the MSVCRT runtime.

The game porting toolkit’s evaluation environment does not pre-install these runtime support packages. If your game makes use of one of these packages, consider searching for and downloading appropriate installers (.exe or .msi) and installing them to your evaluation environment. Additional runtime installers can be run on your environment by just launching the installer and following its installation instructions:

WINEPREFIX=~/my-game-prefix `brew --prefix game-porting-toolkit`/bin/wine64 <some-installer.exe>

And .MSI packages can be installed by launching the Windows uninstaller application and choosing to install a downloaded .msi package:

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

Controller issues

Issues may be fixed by enrolling into the Steam beta.