macOS Game Patches

Gaming on macOS has taken a massive leap over the last few years with the introduction of Apple Silicon, a continued tremendous effort by CodeWeavers and other Wine contributors to rid us of Windows, but also Apple themselves with the introduction of D3DMetal and other tools to assist game developers to port their games.

While we patiently wait for translation layers to get better, game developers to finally realize that the Mac is a viable platform and game utopia to arrive, we need to concede that it can still be increasingly tricky to get a game to run.

That said, some games should run fine, but do not for arbitrary reasons:

• Broken feature detection or graphics device inclusion / exlusion lists
• Incompatiblity with legacy macOS APIs
• Small unresolved issues in CrossOver / Wine
• Anti-cheat measures

Ultimately, the hope is for this repository to be completely empty, but here we are 😊

Note

If a game requires heavy changes to internals such as D3DMetal, MoltenVK or Wine itself, it is out-of-scope for this repository. The same goes for usage of virtualization software such as Parallels or VMware Fusion.

Available Patches

Game	Why?	Note
Jusant	Incompatible DX12 feature detection
Sea of Thieves	Xbox Live + game authentication issues	Easy Anti-Cheat prevents game from running
Tomb Raider I-III Remastered	macOS OpenGL incompatibility	Fixed in CrossOver 24.0.1

Tools & Techniques

• Reverse engineering / (dis)assembly:

  • Binary Ninja
  • Hex Fiend

• Source code:

  • CrossOver Source
  • Unreal Engine (requires sign-up)
  • Chromium Embedded Framework (aka libcef, bane of our existence)

• Obfuscated game binaries:

  • Bridging WineDbg, gdb and lldb to dump memory (example to follow at a later date)