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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

Steam has a surprising amount of Mac games but I fear many will never receive a native M1 update.

The current Steam problem on macOS is more about 32 bit games that never received 64 bit builds, which means they are not playable anymore since Catalina independently of the Intel vs Apple Silicon hardware, notably the first-party GoldSrc and Source engine games, and all of their third party derivatives.

I would not really care if my game library was going through Rosetta 2, as I'd rather take a theoretical performance hit (vs a native arm64 build) than outright be unable to play.

At one point even intel macs broke compatibility with every game that was 3 years old or something stupid like that. I remember that my working game simply refused to execute after a macos version upgrade. Exact same machine, refusing to run my software overnight.

This kind of attitude just isn't conducive for gaming, where people like to build libraries in steam and expect everything to keep working for a long time.

On my PC, I can fire up games from 20 years ago and they work perfectly. Witcher 3, a 7 year old game, is getting an overhaul. I expect no problems in downloading it on steam from my library and playing it seamlessly on my relatively new PC.

Yep - they killed 32 bit compatibility and it’s annoying.

IIRC win64 finally killed win16 support but that was rarely used for games and those games you can dosbox (which amusingly enough works fine on Mac in many cases).

Meanwhile I’ve been happy playing games in Parallels (virtual Windows arm64) like Against the Storm. Crusader Kings 3 has better perf in Parallels than the macOS build.

Indeed! Here is a list of good games that run on the Mac:

https://hypertexthero.com/mac-video-games-for-streaming/

I try to keep it updated and suggestions are always welcome.

Here's another list to keep around.

https://www.applegamingwiki.com/wiki/Home

Does protonDB work for Mac titles, or is it only for Windows? I've been able to play basically every game in my steam library on linux using protonDB. I have hundreds of games.

Theoretically it could, although:

> The main Proton issue is that it runs on DXVK, and MoltenVK is not always up to parity with implementing Vulkan API calls on Metal reliably.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/1344#issuecom...

An alternative would be using CrossOver (which pulls from Wine and adds stuff like MoltenVK), which is what Proton does as well (pulling from Wine and adding stuff, but not MoltenVK) and vendors internally, Valve "just"† doesn't pull from the CrossOver changes nor expose Proton on macOS.

† scare quotes because it may not be as easy as it seems

Proton helps you run Windows games on Linux. A few years ago, the problem with Mac games on Steam was running 32-bit Mac games on 64-bit only macOS builds. Now, it's running x86 Mac games on arm64 Macs. Often, we're talking about those same 32-bit games that never got updated to 64-bits x86, let alone arm.

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