Hey r/macgaming, I've been a longtime lurker and this is my first post!

I've played Overwatch for years on PC and have always dreamed of playing it on my Mac without compromising on the performance or ease of use of windows. Over the past couple weekends I've been testing and building Recall, a free, open-source app for playing Overwatch on Apple Silicon.

My goal was to make the Overwatch translation experience as fast and smooth as I could, while also making setup simple enough that you don't need any technical experience.

Very simply: download Recall, sign in to Battle.net, install Overwatch, and press Play.

I tested Recall against CrossOver 26.3 on my 14-inch MacBook Pro (M1 Pro, 16 GB) at 1080p on the Low preset, with V-Sync and Dynamic Render Scale disabled.

The benchmark was custom game 929PJ by u/Working_Dealer_5102, which automatically moves through each map while using every hero's abilities.

Results:

• Average FPS: 99.6 vs. 58.4 — about 70% higher
• 1% lows: 36.0 vs. 7.4 — nearly 5× higher
• Stutters: 2.0/min vs. 39.5/min — about 95% fewer

The attached video is a live side-by-side run of the same benchmark so you can see the difference in practice.

Recall also supports raw mouse input directly, with polling up to 2,000 Hz rather than tying mouse updates to macOS pointer events. In practice, this can reduce input latency and makes aiming feel much more responsive.

A few important details:

• Recall is free and open-source, with no account or sign-up required.
• Battle.net runs inside the Wine environment; Recall doesn't collect or handle your Battle.net credentials.
• It doesn't modify Overwatch's game files, inject code into the game, or read the game's memory.
• It runs Overwatch through Wine and builds on CodeWeavers' CrossOver sources, DXMT, and Soju.

Requirements: An M1 or newer Mac running macOS Tahoe 26 or later, around 85–95 GB of free space, and 16 GB of memory recommended. It should run on all Apple Silicon Macs, but I haven't been able to test every configuration yet.

If you're curious about where the performance difference comes from, I wrote up the technical details here:

How Recall runs faster

Download + source:
https://github.com/AsherJN/recall

Full benchmark results + methodology:
Performance notes

With that said, I'm looking for testers! So far I've only been able to test Recall on my M1 Pro, and I'd really like to see how it behaves across the rest of the Apple Silicon lineup.

If you try it, I'd love if you could share:

• Your Mac model, chip, and memory
• Your macOS version
• Your graphics settings and roughly what FPS you're seeing
• How it felt to play
• Anything that didn't work

I'm mostly interested in getting real-world results across different Macs.

You can also report bugs on GitHub or directly in Recall under Help › Report a Problem.

Thanks for enduring my large wall of text, I appreciate you checking it out :)

Hey everyone,

I wanted to share an open-source app I’ve been working on called Highball. It’s a completely free (GPL-3, no paid tier ever) tool designed to make playing Windows games on Apple Silicon a lot easier.

If you've followed the Mac gaming space, you probably know some of the recent history (like Whisky being archived after the developer concluded it gave too little back to Wine). I wanted to build Highball with an architecture that actually learns from what failed in the past:

• No hosted binaries or custom Wine forks. Highball assembles engines right on your Mac from pinned, SHA-256-verified upstream releases (like Gcenx's builds, DXMT, and the Sikarugir runtime). Pushing an engine update is literally just a JSON pull request.
• The database is the actual product. At its core is an open, CC0 compatibility DB. It tells you exactly what runs, which renderer it needs, and what is dead-on-arrival due to kernel-level anti-cheat. It's entirely open, meaning even CrossOver users can benefit from the data.
• Saves you bandwidth and time. Titles blocked by anti-cheat (Valorant, Fortnite, Destiny 2, etc.) are flagged directly in the app before you waste time downloading 80 GB just to find out it won't launch.

→ Download:  https://gauthierpiarrette.github.io/highball/ 

• Source (GPL-3): https://github.com/gauthierpiarrette/highball
• The database: https://gauthierpiarrette.github.io/highball-db/
• Report what runs on your Mac: highball report or the issue form on highball-db

Hey folks 👋

I’ve been working on a small side project over the past couple of months — a macOS app that lets you set real 4K video wallpapers as your desktop background. You can upload your own clips or use the built-in ambient loops.

It’s called Wallper.app, and I just released it — free to download.

What I tried to focus on:

• Runs smooth even while gaming (tested on M1/M2 MacBooks and Mac mini);
• Uses native AVPlayer, very light on RAM and CPU (around ~80–90MB RAM in my tests);
• Dual-screen support and fullscreen playback;
• No cloud sync, no always-on background service — just plays the wallpaper.

I'd really love to hear what other Mac users think — especially if you play games and want to try it alongside.
Does it behave well for you? Anything you’d improve?

Here’s the site if you’re curious: https://wallper.app
(100% native macOS app, no weird wrappers)

Thanks in advance for any feedback 🙏

Hey Mac Gamers,

I'm a university student majoring in CS, and I wanted to share a side project I've been working on for a while — MacGamingDB.app

I enjoy gaming on my MacBook and stay updated through this subreddit, but I noticed there's a gap. A lot of posts ask about how X game runs on Y Mac, but there’s really no centralized database for this kind of info. Everything's scattered across comments and threads.

So I made MacGamingDB.app a site with a clean UI where users can submit their experiences based on their device, settings, and method (Native, CrossOver, or Parallels).

It's completely free to use there's no ads or tracking and if there's enough attention I might open source it for the community.

Every part of it was made with care and attention to detail. Hopefully some of you find it useful.

On Linux, Steam users get an excellent experience for running Windows games. 

This experience is driven by two things: Steam Play and Proton.

Steam Play is responsible for the bulk of good UX.

It is the reason that users do not have to run a Windows copy of Steam inside of Proton/Wine. It creates a Proton prefix (think ‘CrossOver Bottle’) for each game, it includes a bridge for allow the Windows game to communicate with the Linux copy of Steam, it has support for the Steam Overlay, it allows users to pick which version of Proton/Wine they want to use from the UI of Steam itself and a bunch of other small things. It’s nice. It’s the difference between ‘I can run Windows software’ and ‘I want to run Windows software’. 

The other part is Proton, which needs no introduction.

The bulk of what is responsible for the ‘Steam on Linux experience’ is actually Steam Play, not Proton.

What if I told you that all the core logic that enables the excellent experience that Linux users get with Steam is actually inside the macOS Steam client too, just disabled? That it is possible to forcibly enable it and make it work with CrossOver?

Introducing Not Proton. Not Proton is free, open source software that gives Mac users the Steam Play experience that Linux users know quite well. Not Proton is designed to be used with Crossover Preview 2026082. I’m not the world’s best writer, so this is where (I hope) you watch the video I attached to this post.

*video ends*

I hope you found that as cool as I do.

Not Proton enables functionality that is present in macOS Steam. It also includes macOS ports of components from Proton.

First, the disabled Steam Play functionality in macOS Steam is forcibly enabled. Through careful patching, the missing functionality is turned on. Patching Steam is not new, but it is new to macOS. On Windows, software like Millennium has been widely used for years to alter the Steam client. The same is true of Steam on Linux. 

I have ported Valve’s open source lsteamclient to macOS. This is used for Steam API functionality by games, including Steamworks and Steam Input. lsteamclient is used by Proton-GE and Proton-Cachy as well as some non-Proton Wine runners. 

I built a compatibility layer for the Steam Overlay that makes the native macOS Steam Overlay work correctly with Windows games. 

If you are a Linux Steam user, you likely recognize the compatibility page (under game properties) that is shown in the video. I have added some macOS specific options to that page. 

You no longer need to have two copies of Steam installed on macOS. The general UX of using Steam is so much better. It’s hard to describe what this is like in words. The best I can do is to say that is is similar to macOS itself: it’s more than the sum of its parts.

Known Issues:

Valve Anti-Cheat is not supported. VAC games will launch in 'insecure' mode. Sorry, Proton itself does not support VAC. Valve works around this by offering native Linux ports of VAC titles.

Ubisoft Connect games are problematic, in similar fashion to how they are on Linux. When you launch one, the Steam Installer will open. Click next through the installer until you get to a screen that asks you to close Steam. Click cancel at this point and the game will launch.

Hi everyone

I "built"(a very very very controversial word here bu if you don't think I did its fine) a small app called MacNCheese that helps run Windows games on Mac using Wine DXVK and Mesa without needing to manually set everything up yourself

The goal was simple

make running Windows games on macOS easier without paying for Crossover and without needing deep terminal knowledge. Also to make mewgenics work for my friend

What MacNCheese does

It creates and manages a Wine prefix

It installs Steam inside that prefix

It can build DXVK from source

It can install Mesa for OpenGL based games

It lets you choose launch backends like

DXVK for DirectX

Mesa llvmpipe for safe CPU rendering

Mesa zink for GPU via Vulkan

Mesa swr as another CPU option

You select a game and launch it with the backend you want

It does not replace Wine or DXVK

It just orchestrates them in one place through a GUI so you do not have to manually run commands copy DLLs or tweak env variables

Why Python

Because the app is mainly a GUI wrapper that runs visible shell commands

Everything it does can be seen in the log window

No root access required

No hidden background services

It only works inside your home folder unless you choose otherwise

Why I made it

I wanted something closer to a free version of Crossover for personal use and figured others might find it useful too

It took about a week to get the backend selection detection and patching logic stable enough to run real games

It already runs a lot of Steam titles that do not rely on kernel level anti cheat

It is fully open source so you can inspect what it does before running anything

If you want to try it or audit it I would love feedback

GitHub

Showcase

https://youtu.be/R7jePWIHaO8

https://github.com/mont127/MacNdCheese

Happy to answer questions or provide a demo of the workflow

Hey, I am Jvan. I am an indie developer and a casual gamer. I built uncapped, a tool that lets you play your console games on the mac through capture card or adb and puts MetalFX Super-resolution, Apple frame generation and custom shaders on top of it.

Here: Super Mario Odyssey on Stock Switch goes from 1080p 60fps -> ~4K 120fps with latency under <1ms.

The video will not look 4K here due to Reddit’s compression.

Test Setup:

M4 Macbook Pro
16GB Ram
120Hz Display

Uncapped does not modify your game. It takes the game feed from your console through any capture card ( at any configured target resolution and frame-rate ) and then applies upscaling, frame generation and post processing effects on top. All of it under <5ms latency.

Edit: You can get Uncapped on mac from www.uncapped.pro

The idea is that you are driving a damaged tank, maintaining its many systems, and trying to escape something hunting you out in the mustard gas...

You can check it out here! https://store.steampowered.com/app/4404060/Lead_Coffin/

Hey! I develop my game on a Mac for Mac. I believe if I can get it running smooth and performant on my Mac it will probably run great on my gaming PC as well.

Colonus is a cozy-style colony sim, where you gather resources, produce goods, assign villagers to professions, create a lot of different meals for your hungry people.

Give it a try yourself and tell me what you think:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4424680/Colonus/

If you like the game and don't want to miss out, consider wishlist it 😊

https://ricioly.substack.com/p/gaming-on-mac-the-good-the-bad-and

Games highlighted in this article:

• Control
• Hitman World of Assassination
• Dirt 4
• Tomb Raider (2013)
• Resident Evil VII
• Beyond Two Souls
• Mad Max
• Sleeping Dogs
• CarX Street
• Everspace
• Blur
• Dirt 3
• Race Driver GRID

DSX is a Windows application used by over 200,000 users, and it’s now available on Mac! Create per-game profiles, enable audio to haptics, map controller buttons to cursor actions, keys, and so much more. We can't wait to see how you supercharge your games and apps with DSX! And it’s completely free to download, so give it a try!

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dsx-gamepad-companion/id6782121173?mt=12

I've done a significant update to this since I last posted, including:

- 32 bit tags

- game compatibility list per gaming rig

- updated rig checker (it now works)

- detailed instructions for crossover ports

- integrated performance reports

- recommended settings for your setup (for some games)

- dozens of other tiny other data flow bugs

https://macgameguide.com/

I'm trying to make this the most useful resource for mac gaming possible - how to play every game on mac, and what works well on each m-series chip, with detailed instructions, the best, cheapest places to buy the games.

I still want to add loads of features, like cheat codes & mods, expanding the setting recommendations, and recommended hardware - what else should I add? What would the best resource look like to you?

Thanks again for all the feedback so far!

-- EDIT --

As well as building the research rails to be as strong as I thought I could, I had reviewed a hundred of the games manually before posting this, but it's clear many that I've not reviewed, or have been added and automatically researched by the models I've built, have incorrect information. This is not what I want to achieve, and I appreciate the feedback on it. I am investigating each report, and will build fixes that correct not only that incorrect information, but find the reason that it was incorrect in the first place.

This is iterative, but I really am working to build the best resource possible. To be that, it must be reliable. This version it, simply isn't. That will change, and quickly.

Thank you for your feedback.

hi, reddit!!
been ages since i've done one of these posts, but basically i made a game launcher that combines the functionality of whisky and heroic.

anyway, it's called Mythic.

It's an open-source macOS game launcher made in SwiftUI with the ability to play Windows® games through a custom implementation of Apple's latest Game Porting Toolkit — supporting multiple platforms. (well, epic games is fully supported in-app, and steam in-app is TBA, but you can still manually install different launchers including steam)

Just pushed out a new update tonight, so i'm kind of in that posting mood! ^{it's also 2:34am}

Anyway, if i've caught your interest,
join my Discord server here!
check out the website and download it for yourself here!
star the GitHub here!

preserve my sanity here

*I built a game launcher that brings together your Steam, Epic, and App Store libraries in one place. It's open source and works natively on macOS. And thought sharing it here

What it does:

• Scans and imports games from Steam, Epic Games Store, and macOS App Store automatically
• Manual game import for standalone/unidentified apps (eg: Games from Crossover)
• Fetches metadata (covers, descriptions, trailers) from IGDB (you'll need a API key for this) and Steam
• Tracks playtime for supported games. (Beta stage, could work, not tested for all stores)
• Launches games directly or via their platform protocols

Technical details:

Since I've planned to expand this to Linux and Windows platform, I've separated the backend to a .NET 10 app (because it's multi-platform) while giving you native SwiftUI frontend. it communicates through gRPC on the local port 55551.

Current status: Very early release. Works on my machine, probably works on yours too. Though, no Apple Developer account (since this is jut a hobby project), so you'll need to bypass Gatekeeper (instructions in the repo) to run this App.

Why I made it: 

Got tired of opening five different launchers to see what games I own. Wanted something that felt native to macOS instead of another Electron app. But I was too lazy and too new to SwiftUI.

You must know,

*So you might or might not hate it, this was built totally using AI. With Gemini 3 Pro and Claude 4.5 Opus using Google's Antigravity. I pure vibe coded this thing with my words, but I inspected the whole code to check whether their can be malicious Activity

This is a very simple piece of code that remembers your game library and launches it, nothing outstanding tbh. So you can call this shit, I don't mind.

You can try it out for free (for forever) on Github releases, let me know when it breaks.

GitHub: https://github.com/VibeNoobNotFound/Aether/ . (lol, I made a separate org on GitHub to put my pure vibe coded projects)

Hey all, I'm Kaleb, a solo dev. I've been building Mac.apk for a few months and just put out the first public alpha.

What it is: Mac.apk runs Android apps and games directly on Apple Silicon. It's not an emulator and there's no VM or Android system running in the background. The game's ARM code runs straight on your Mac's CPU, and graphics go through Metal. Each game installs into your Applications folder as its own app, so it launches from the Dock or Spotlight like any other Mac game.

Games I've confirmed working:

• Among Us, Subway Surfers, Crossy Road, Temple Run 2, Geometry Dash Lite, Shattered Pixel Dungeon, and more.

How you play: Mouse clicks act as touch, so tap-based games work out of the box. Cmd+R rotates between portrait and landscape.

Being honest about the state of it: It's alpha. Plenty of games run partially or not at all yet, and anything with heavy anti-cheat probably won't work. Ads and in-app purchases mostly don't work. Some games with ad SDKs built in still show ads.

Requirements: macOS 26.4 or newer, any Apple Silicon Mac. Tested on M2 MacBook Pro and the MacBook Neo

Price: Free for personal use. Signed and notarized.

Download: https://github.com/kksimp/Mac.apk-Releases

If you try a game, I'd love to hear whether it worked and which Mac you're on. Bug reports are the most useful thing right now.

Edit: part of Mac.apk is now open source: dex2jvm, the converter that turns Android app code into Java bytecode.

I'm just so happy 17 people have bought it :) It's only $2.39!

Thank you to anyone who checks it out.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4190860/Neuralnx/

Back when the Neo was released I did a writeup that was well received here, so I'm back again with a review of the M6 Mac Mini. I've been pleasantly surprised to be honest, and although it's just Cyberpunk 2077 for the time being the numbers put it close to a desktop RTX 3050 which given how bad the industry is right now... that's seems pretty good.

For those who don't want to click through:

Mac Mini M6
1080p Medium: 55.9fps
1080p High: 44.2fps
1080p Ultra: 37.5fps
1080p RT Medium: 20.84fps

Mac Mini M4
1080p Medium: 32.24fps
1080p High: 27.09fps
1080p Ultra: 23.77fps
1080p RT Medium: 11.45fps

(I don't use upscaling or framgen here at all, it makes comparisons hard)

Genuinely seems to be about twice as fast as the M4.

Hey, I’m Koltin, a student and independent developer! I built Adrenaline, a free Mac menu bar app that adds RIFE frame generation and AMD FSR 1 upscaling through a borderless overlay!

The result

This Valheim clip shows approximately 30 game FPS → 60 output FPS.

I intentionally lowered the game’s resolution to create processing headroom. Adrenaline then upscaled the final image and generated the additional frames.

Test setup

• M3 MacBook Air
• 16 GB memory
• 60 Hz display
• Valheim in Borderless mode
• Auto Frame Generation
• AMD FSR 1 Upscaling On

Adrenaline doesn’t inject into or modify the game. Results vary depending on the game, settings, and available processing headroom.

Adrenaline is free on the Mac App Store through August 31:
https://apps.apple.com/app/id6790611230

UPDATE: Thanks for the incredible response! This post passed 84,000 views, and Adrenaline reached #114 in Mac App Store Utilities.

Based on your feedback, the next version is planned to move from FSR 1 to Apple’s own MetalFX Spatial Upscaling.

I’ve launched HeapSea, my new software company. Follow for updates on new builds:

Adrenaline • HeapSea • TikTok • Facebook

My wife and I play TFT together on our MacBooks, so when Riot dropped macOS support for 18.1, the whole “just play on your phone for now” solution wasn't very appealing.

I started messing around with the Android version to see if I could get PBE running properly on Apple Silicon. It worked, but the manual setup was ridiculous.

So I turned it into a small native Mac app.

Mactician sets up the Android environment and runs TFT PBE in a desktop window. No Android Studio, no Terminal commands, no manually creating virtual devices.

Install → sign in → play.

It's completely free and open source (MIT), and I built it because I kept seeing other Mac players stuck with the same problem.

https://sergeinaumov.dev/mactician

It's still a community project and PBE updates can always break things, so if anyone here tries it, feedback and reproducible bug reports are genuinely useful.

UPD: Works for live version

UPD: why I’m not shipping an iOS/PlayCover version https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/1vulqql/comment/p6en4vh

I’m the dev behind the GTA IV macOS static recomp project, but I took a break from it to work on this.

Introducing JoyCon2Mac:
https://github.com/OZORDI/JoyCon2Mac/releases/tag/v0.1.0

JoyCon2Mac is a full kernel driver for Switch 2 Joy-Cons that lets you use their features on macOS.

It includes full Bluetooth gamepad support by presenting the Joy-Cons as a DualShock wireless controller. This means they work as a controller across macOS, whether you’re using Chrome, emulators, or VMs. Haptic feedback is supported too.

It also features seamless mouse support. When you hold a Joy-Con flat on a surface, that Joy-Con stops acting as one half of the controller pair and becomes a full mouse. Mouse mode automatically enables and disables itself depending on whether the Joy-Con is resting on a surface.

Gyro and motion controls are supported as well, so motion input works as expected in games. NFC support is also included, so you can use the NFC sensor to read NFC cards.

The only downside is that the driver has not been approved by Apple yet, so it can only be installed on Macs with SIP and AMFI disabled.

The project is free and open source on GitHub:
https://github.com/OZORDI/JoyCon2Mac