The Mac has plenty of games, but it'll always get the short end of the stick compared to Windows. If you want to play the latest games on your Mac, you have no choice but to install Windows ... or do you?

There are a few ways you can play Windows games on your Mac without having to dedicate a partition to Boot Camp or giving away vast amounts of hard drive space to a virtual machine app like VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop. Here are a few other options for playing Windows games on your Mac without the hassle or expense of having to install Windows.

GeForce Now

PC gaming on Mac? Yes you can, thanks to Nvidia's GeForce Now. The service allows users to play PC games from Steam or Battle.net on macOS devices. Better still, the graphic power of these games resides on Nvidia's servers. The biggest drawback: the service remains in beta, and there's been no announcement when the first full release is coming or what a monthly subscription will cost.

Oct 29, 2019  The Mac has plenty of games, but it'll always get the short end of the stick compared to Windows. If you want to play the latest games on your Mac, you have no choice but to install Windows. There are a few ways you can play Windows games on your Mac without having to dedicate a partition to Boot Camp or giving away vast amounts of hard drive space to a virtual machine app like. 18 Best Console Emulators (PC, Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, Linux) Collection. The great thing about emulation and console emulators is they let us preserve our history and love for the classic games! Without emulation, it would be hard to get an old Atari, Sega or Nintendo game to work on a computer. Blizzard Entertainment is a PC, console, and mobile game developer known for its epic multiplayer titles including the Warcraft, Diablo, StarCraft, and Overwatch series.

For now, at least, the service is free to try and enjoy. All supported GeForce NOW titles work on Macs, and yes, there are plenty of them already available!

The Wine Project

The Mac isn't the only computer whose users have wanted to run software designed for Windows. More than 20 years ago, a project was started to enable Windows software to work on POSIX-compliant operating systems like Linux. It's called The Wine Project, and the effort continues to this day. OS X is POSIX-compliant, too (it's Unix underneath all of Apple's gleam, after all), so Wine will run on the Mac also.

Wine is a recursive acronym that stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator. It's been around the Unix world for a very long time, and because OS X is a Unix-based operating system, it works on the Mac too.

As the name suggests, Wine isn't an emulator. The easiest way to think about it is as a compatibility layer that translates Windows Application Programming Interface (API) calls into something that the Mac can understand. So when a game says 'draw a square on the screen,' the Mac does what it's told.

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You can use straight-up Wine if you're technically minded. It isn't for the faint of heart, although there are instructions online, and some kind souls have set up tutorials, which you can find using Google. Wine doesn't work with all games, so your best bet is for you to start searching for which games you'd like to play and whether anyone has instructions to get it working on the Mac using Wine.

Note: At the time of this writing, The Wine Project does not support macOS 10.15 Catalina.

CrossOver Mac

CodeWeavers took some of the sting out of Wine by making a Wine-derived app called CrossOver Mac. CrossOver Mac is Wine with specialized Mac support. Like Wine, it's a Windows compatibility layer for the Mac that enables some games to run.

CodeWeavers has modified the source code to Wine, made some improvements to configuration to make it easier, and provided support for their product, so you shouldn't be out in the cold if you have trouble getting things to run.

My experience with CrossOver — like Wine — is somewhat hit or miss. Its list of actual supported games is pretty small. Many other unsupported games do, in fact work — the CrossOver community has many notes about what to do or how to get them to work, which are referenced by the installation program. Still, if you're more comfortable with an app that's supported by a company, CrossOver may be worth a try. What's more, a free trial is available for download, so you won't be on the hook to pay anything to give it a shot.

Boxer

If you're an old-school gamer and have a hankering to play DOS-based PC games on your Mac, you may have good luck with Boxer. Boxer is a straight-up emulator designed especially for the Mac, which makes it possible to run DOS games without having to do any configuring, installing extra software, or messing around in the Mac Terminal app.

With Boxer, you can drag and drop CD-ROMs (or disk images) from the DOS games you'd like to play. It also wraps them into self-contained 'game boxes' to make them easy to play in the future and gives you a clean interface to find the games you have installed.

Boxer is built using DOSBox, a DOS emulation project that gets a lot of use over at GOG.com, a commercial game download service that houses hundreds of older PC games that work with the Mac. So if you've ever downloaded a GOG.com game that works using DOSBox, you'll have a basic idea of what to expect.

Some final thoughts

In the end, programs like the ones listed above aren't the most reliable way to play Windows games on your Mac, but they do give you an option.

Of course, another option is to run Windows on your Mac, via BootCamp or a virtual machine, which takes a little know-how and a lot of memory space on your Mac's hard drive.

How do you play your Windows games on Mac?

Let us know in the comment below!

Updated October 2019: Updated with the best options.

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C.J.'s next Fishing Tourney will be in July

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There are four Fishing Tourneys each year in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Here's when they are and what the rules are for participating.

If you’re looking for old Mac software, there are a number of sites on the interwebs that are worth checking out:

Macintosh Garden– great site for old Mac games, system software and abandoned applications
Rescue My Classic Mac – old Macintosh boot floppies and applications available for purchase
Macintosh Repository – a sanctuary for old software of the classic Mac OS era
Mac GUI – customize your Mac’s look and feel with Themes, Desktops, Icons, Widgets, etc..
Mac OS 9 Lives – tips and software for running the Classic Mac OS; audio-centric focus
U-Mich Software Archives – large legacy software collection, for Macs and other platforms
Max1zzz’s Classic Mac Server – another vast collection of Mac system and application software
The Gryphel Project – 68k era Mac software and home of the Mini VMac Mac Plus emulator
E-Maculation – dedicated to emulation of the classic Macintosh computer in OS X, Windows and Linux
OldApps.com – installers for superceded and obsoleted Mac OS X software
PowerPC Software Archive– links to the most current PowerPC compatible versions of many programs
The Mac Driver Museum – old hardware drivers for Mac printers, disks, video cards and related items (partial archive)
MacFixer Mac Software Library – a growing compendium of early Mac system, utility and game installers
The Internet Archive – the grand attic of the internet adds software to its collection

Mac OS 9.2.2 for PowerMac G4 MDD– Retail Mac OS 9 installers do not work on the last generation PowerMac G4 MDD models. This is a copy of Mac OS 9.2.2 included on the MDD bundled Software Restore CDs which is able to boot these G4 models into OS 9 (FireWire 400 models only). It can also be used as Classic Mode on any PowerMac running Mac OS X 10.1-10.4.

ProTools 3.4 Free– Pro Tools 3.4 Digital Audio Workstation software was released free of charge by Digidesign in 1997. This is a fully-functional 16-track version of the program which runs on many 68k Nubus Macs and old PCI PowerMacs.

SoundApp – a swiss army knife for old sound files. Play and convert many vintage audio formats with this useful utility.

Classilla and TenFourFox – ports of the current Firefox web browser, optimized for Mac OS 9 (Classilla) and PowerPC Macs running OS X Tiger (TenFourFox). Get online with your vintage Mac!

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PrintToPDF– a free utility to create PDF files on classic Macs running System 7 through Mac OS 9. This is a handy way to keep the formatting of old documents you can’t otherwise convert.

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The Vintage Mac Museum is a private, working collection of the pre-Intel Apple Macintosh. We provide old Mac file transfer and conversion services, along with research into old Mac technologies for patent prior art searches or academic purposes.