This post will clear up some clouds about the recently developed situation with Apple Silicon (Macs with a M1 Chip/Non-intel). Last week Apple released their new line with Mac’s with the new M1 chips and since last week available in the Apple Store/Mac resellers. So many people bought these Macs because of their performance and other benefits. However! The raising question is, will Porting Kit and the games work these Macs with Apple M1 chip?
The answer is “no” at the moment, and “yes” in the near future with the coming WS11WineCX20.0.2 Engine and Big Sur 11.1 (read 11.1 and not the active 11.0.1). How everything will work on these chips still needs be tested. What we do know is that Crossover will support it and while we are using the open source engines of it, it will work on Porting Kit too, but only with Big Sur 11.1. So if you have the 11.1 Beta, then only the WS11WineCX20.0.2 or higher engine is required. Due to some issues with the Basic WS11Wine20.0.0 Engines at crossover itself, we haven’t created an CX20 engine yet for the Porting Kit but WS11WineCX20.0.2 will be created for sure if not only for the Apple M1 Silicon Macs. This engine will be released soon. About the performance of the games on these Macs with M1 chips, we still need to test thoroughly, we do not know how every game will react on it using the Rosetta 2 emulation built into Big Sur.
If we read the report of Codeweavers, then it looks very promising, but not everything is “Alleluia” yet. Games may “Lag” and Codeweavers is working on finetuning the process. We from the Porting Kit Team will purchase an Mac Mini M1 Silicon Mac to test the games as well. We hope starting the testing within a few weeks because the Mac still needs to be ordered and we also need the CX20.0.2 Engine to be able to test it on Big Sur 11.1. We will start testing with the most popular games. We want to remind you all that playing all games on Apple M1 Silicon Macs is still a long road to go and if you were planning to buy a new Mac and want to be certain to play your games, maybe buying an Intel Mac to get through the coming years (while we work on supporting Apple Silicon in Porting Kit), isn’t the worst idea.
Eventually Apple will also drop support for “Rosetta 2” within a few years, and then Codeweavers need to find a different solution which is most likely the Hangover project which seems to be on it’s way, but still a lot of work in process.
Conclusion, yes a lot is going on, and we might be a bit optimistic, but there is a lot of work which still needs to be done. Stay tuned on the paulthetall.com blog for updates about this and the release of the WS11WineCX20.0.2 engine.
