XWA with UP in Mac OS?

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XWA with UP in Mac OS?

mateus
Lieutenant Commander
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Joined: Sat Dec 25, 2004 12:01 am

Post by mateus » Fri Nov 13, 2020 9:53 pm

Holy crap! It's been a looooong time!
Amazing to see how gorgeous everything looks now =D
Amazing to see I still remember a few names here! You guys have the force!
Congrats to all!

Now... Can I run all those, and custom stuff in my Macbook?

Cheers from Brazil!

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Vince T
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Post by Vince T » Fri Nov 13, 2020 11:21 pm

Hey Mateus! Good to see you still alive and kicking!

I don't think XWA has a Mac client so you'd need some sort of Emulator. Have you tried Parallels Desktop?
Your ship, Captain. I need a drink. - Vince Trageton
Vince T's X-Wing HQ - where the bad guys get their gear

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darklord
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Post by darklord » Sat Nov 14, 2020 9:10 pm

You can always try your hand at

Wine
https://www.winehq.org/

or

Wineskin (Wine wrapped into an app bundle for your game.)
https://sourceforge.net/projects/wineskin/

You will have issues that will have to be worked through, especially when it comes to the XWAU installers. I can't tell you what the current state of it as it's been 5 years since i had a mac. Oddly enough I remember having an easier time with Wineskin than wine on Linux.

The other option is to install windows via bootcamp.

dhollinger3
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Post by dhollinger3 » Mon Nov 30, 2020 5:47 pm

mateus wrote:
Fri Nov 13, 2020 9:53 pm
Holy crap! It's been a looooong time!
Amazing to see how gorgeous everything looks now =D
Amazing to see I still remember a few names here! You guys have the force!
Congrats to all!

Now... Can I run all those, and custom stuff in my Macbook?

Cheers from Brazil!
While it is certainly possible to try and run it manually in WINE, you may have some difficulties. A few of the tools Linux users (like myself) and vendors (like Valve) use to get most Windows games running well in WINE are not available for MacOS. Apple dropping support for 32-bit.... well anything..... in Catalina combined with their decision to create Metal instead of using Vulkan has thrown a wrench into WINE gaming as a whole on the Platform.

DXVK (DirectX 9/10/11 to Vulkan) is possible to use in MacOS, but you also have to setup MoltenVK (Vulkan to Metal) on MacOS to use it and it has some performance problems as you are now going through 2+ translation layers rather than just one. This still doesn't solve any issues related to the potential missing 32-bit libraries.

Additionally, the tools that make this kind of thing mostly Plug-n-play on Linux - Valve's Proton and Lutris - are not supported at all in MacOS and there doesn't seem to be an easy equivalent other than (maybe) Crossover - which requires a yearly or lifetime fee to use.

EDIT: None of this is to say it won't work, just that you may have to do the heavy lifting yourself as much of the automated tooling that exists from Steam, Lutris, and other communities dropped/don't have support for MacOS.

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