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Using Heroic on a Mac computer

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Ariel Juodziukynas edited this page Apr 20, 2026 · 18 revisions

OS Version

We always recommend using the latest version of the OS, the tools Heroic uses require usually either the latest or the previous version of the OS to even run.

Compatibility Layers

Heroic supports different compatibility layer for MacOS. These tools are used to run Windows builds of games.

Mac gaming is not as mature as linux or Windows, so you might need to try different compatibility layers for some games or do some tweaking (one game may not work with GPTK but work with Wine-Crossover, or be usable with Wine-Staging but have better performance with the commercial Crossover, you'll have to play around with the options and find out what works better in your case).

Wine-Crossover

Heroic allows installing Wine-Crossover builds from https://github.com/Gcenx/winecx/releases. Many games will work just fine with this Wine flavor and it's compatible both with Intel and Apple Silicon chips.

It has limitations and known issues:

  • it is based on Crossover 23, while newest Crossover is at version 25 at the moment of writing this, so it's outdated
  • it does not support DX12 games
  • many games show invisible content due to a known issues for DXVK for Mac
  • check the release notes on that repo for more details

Note this is NOT the commercial version of Crossover from CodeWeavers (listed below)

Wine-Staging (Wine-Devel)

Heroic allows installing Wine-Staging/Wine-Devel builds from https://github.com/Gcenx/macOS_Wine_builds/releases. This is based on Wine itself instead of Crossover and it's more up-to-date and may fix issues in some games. this is compatible with both Intel and Apple Silicon chips.

It can use Wined3d, DXVK, and DXMT (check those below).

Game Porting Toolkit (GPTK)

Heroic allows installing Game Porting Toolkit builds from https://github.com/Gcenx/game-porting-toolkit/releases. This is based on Apple's Game Porting Toolkit, which is based on an older version of Wine. It's meant to be used for modern games that require DX11 or DX12 and only runs on Apple Silicon chips. It uses D3DMetal.

Whisky

Heroic supports using Whisky as a compatibility layer, but it's not maintained anymore and not recommended! You can still use it if you know what you are doing, but don't ask for support using it, try the other options instead (GPTK will most likely work better and is up-to-date).

Crossover

Heroic supports using the commercial Crossover (either paid or the 14-days free trial) from https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover. Check Crossover's guide on how to integrate it with Heroic.

This is the most powerful version of the pack, it gets more frequent updates, it supports both Intel and Apple Silicon chips, it supports multiple graphics layers to pick from and also supports running more software. But this is a paid option, you can try it for a few days for free but you'll need to buy a license to use it eventually.

Others

There are more tools like Sikarugir that are not yet compatible with Heroic (at the moment of writing this page)

Running DirectX games

DirectX is not supported natively, so different API translation layers are available:

DXVK (DXVK-MacOS)

DXVK-MacOS is a fork of DXVK that converts DX calls to Vulkan. Even though it's pretty outdated, it works fine for many games. It is the recommended to use with Wine-Crossover and an option for both the commercial Crossover (I'm not sure if Crossover keeps it more up-to-date though) and WineStaging.

Only supports DirectX 10 and 11.

Note that this is the only available option for Intel macs.

DXMT

DXMT is a translation layer that uses Metal (Mac's graphics API) under the hood. It works really good in general, is more up-to-date, and it's available for both Wine Staging and the commercial Crossover.

Only supports DirectX 10 and 11.

This is only available for Apple Silicon chips. (even though DXMT has some experimental support for Intel macs, that's something left for the users to experiment)

D3DMetal

D3DMetal is a graphics API translation layer from the game porting toolkit supporting DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 games. This is used by GamePortingToolkit and can be used by the commercial Crossover.

Only supports Direct3D 11 and 12.

This is only available for Apple Silicon macs.

Wined3d

This is the default API translation layer by Wine, it is used when the Auto Install DXVK option is disabled when using Wine-Staging or Wine-Crossover. The performance is not good and we do not recommend using it unless the other options don't work.

Only supports DirectX 11 and below.

Note that Sikarugir supports all these options too.

Will "my game" work?

As mentioned before, you have to try the different layers and hope for the best, there's a not-small chance for games to just not work on MacOS (games with Anti-Cheat software will almost always not work on MacOS).

Here are some resources you can check too (keep in mind everything is crowd-sources, so things can be outdated or incorrect):

Apple Silicon (M chips)

Rosetta

Apple Silicon chips require a translation layer to understand software made for x86/64 architecture. Apple provides Rosetta for this and you'll need this in order to play Windows games through wine/crossover/gptk.

To install or update it, open a terminal and run this command:

softwareupdate --install-rosetta

When Rosetta is missing or outdated, this error shows up in the logs:

Error: spawn Unknown system error -86

Intel chips

Mac computers with Intel chips do not need a translation layer, but they cannot use the modern Game Porting Toolkit. In this case, your options are Wine-Crossover, Wine-Staging/Wine-Devel, or Crossover.

Winetricks setup

winetricks is a tool used to install libraries and apply changes to wine prefixes. Heroic can apply some known fixes for specific games based on the information we collect at https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/known-fixes.

For these fixes to work, winetricks must be setup correctly. When running the Winetricks option in a game's settings dialog, it's common to see these 3 warnings:

7z not installed! Winetricks might fail to install some packages or even open
cabextract not installed! Winetricks might fail to install some packages or even open
zenity not installed! Winetricks might fail to install some packages or even open
  • cabextract is needed to install important known-fixes packages like d3dcompiler, the easiest way to get it installed is through Homebrew, we recommend installing Homebrew and then installing the cabextract package.
  • zenity is needed to run the GUI interface of winetricks, you can ignore it for the known-fixes to work but you might want it if you want to manually play around with things heroic does not provide easy access to, you can install it with Homebrew running brew install zenity
  • 7z can also be installed with Homebrew with brew install 7zip, but it only adds the 7zz command. After that, check where the 7zz command is with which 7zz and create a symlink for 7z with sudo ln -s /path_from_which/7zz /path_from_which/7z so it allows using 7z as a command too.

Note these dependencies can also be installed using MacPorts, and that will work in Heroic after this is merged.

Wired Xbox controller not working with GPTK

This is a known issue with the Game Porting Toolkit before version 3.0.2. The easiest solution is to update your GPTK version, other options include switching to something else like Crossover, using the controller wireless, and using a different type of controller that is not Xbox.

Incorrect report of available empty space (Not enough space error when installing games)

This seems to be related to Time Machine and how it reports empty space in tools like Finder versus what the df command returns (that we use in Heroic https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/HeroicGamesLauncher/issues/3178).

The current known solution for this is to disable or cleanup old Time Machine snapshots.

Running Steam for Windows

Read https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/HeroicGamesLauncher/wiki/Installing-Steam-for-Windows-on-MacOS

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