Some news regarding Apple M1/M2 Silicon Pro’s support in Wine.
Thanks to your crowdfund support, I was able to buy in the Black Friday deals a M1 (yeah no M2, issue seemed to be in Pro’s) Macbook Pro 14″ and check out myself games and update ports where necessary. After investigating a bunch of games the past day, I found a few things. First of all, Apple Silicon support for game ports is growing. With every new Wine version or Mac update (Rosetta support) support is getting better. There are a bunch of general issues which still needs to overcome regarding: Speed/Performance (choppy gameplay for some games like Fallout 3 and New Vegas, Dishonored and more), graphical glitches (in some games), some sound issues in some games like Strongholds Warlords.
Then we have a special group within Apple Silicon Macs with separate problems…the MacBook Pro’s. They have a special problem regarding support for lower resolutions. These Mac’s simply don’t support resolutions of 640×480/800×600/1024×768 and even some higher). A lot of (especially older) games, have a default resolution of the earlier mentioned, and when launching the games on those Macbook Pro’s the game will or give an “Direct3D”/”Initialization” error message or give black screen, or won’t do a thing at all! Reason for those people to mail me about it.
Luckily those issues can be rather easily be resolved by connecting those MacBooks to an external monitor (supporting these resolutions). So in short: when you have a 13″, 14″, 16″ Apple Silicon Macbook Pro, then an External Monitor isn’t a luxury. I am doing my best to bring in widescreen solutions for old games, but there isn’t always a solution available for all the games in our massive database. So an external display, or a solution by Apple or Wine development will still be necessary.
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Thanks so much Paul! I’m trying to play Star Trek Bridge Commander on a MacBook Air M2, always with an external monitor. I get a black screen but then it just quits/fails to load. Would welcome any attention you can give to this!
Thank you for your help so far! “Pharao” runs after your update without problems. Would love to also play “Zeus” and “Emperor” on the Mac Book Pro in the future. As I play on the sofa with the macbook on my lap, an external screen is no option for me ;) Maybe some day you find the time to fix the other two games, too.
Ok, I need to correct myself – you DID already update the other games – my mistake! THANK YOU!!!
Is it possible to run such games in some kind of windowed mode instead of full screen?
I mean wine has this feature called “Emulate a virtual desktop” https://forum.winehq.org/viewtopic.php?t=2255 so I’m curious if using that could fix those low resolution problems on mac pros.
Hoping for Age of Mythology on M1. ?
Hello have you tried to change the MBP to Displays setting to More Space before launching some games?
I know it helps to make latest Elders Scrolls Online run on M1 natively that other wise gets a black and shut down. Maybe it could help here.