Gaming on the Mac

I recently acquired an M5 MacBook Pro.

That sentence would have been absurd to me two years ago. I've run Dells, Toshiba Satellites, IBM ThinkPads, Lenovos, a System76 box I killed in an eight-inch drop, and Windows since 3.11 — with enough Linux distro hops to fill a memoir. Once, circa 2006, I bought a white plastic MacBook with a Superdrive that failed out of the gate. I left Apple vowing never to pay the Tax again.

What changed: an iPad replaced a dead eReader, an iPhone replaced an Android ecosystem I was exhausted fighting, and eventually I bit the bullet on the M5. It's wonderful. I won't belabor it — that's a post for another day.

What I will say — and I can't say it strongly enough — is that I did not buy a Mac to use as a gaming rig. I'm not stupid. I knew what the box was for, and it does all of it well. But if a machine is going to be with me all the time, gaming on it as much as it'll allow seemed worth exploring.
Reddit, predictably, had thoughts.

So my jam is older consoles, older indie games. I don't play triple A titles for the most part.

The Mac is perfect at all of this. I'm running Breath of the Wild flawlessly, I'm playing games going all the way back to the DOS era, and even Win 98 titles. Here's how:

• Crossover : Factor the cost into the purchase. You will not regret it. Does it do everything? No, but most things are going to work very well. I've had parity between running this, and GE-Proton on Arch; very little fails.
• OpenEMU: If you're into older consoles, this makes emulation a very laid back experience. Bringing in a large library is a bit of a pain, but if you're a curator by nature, zero pain here.
• Boxer: The single most enjoyable experience in setting up and running DOS games on modern OS's I've ever had. If I told you this app wasn't a factor in my purchase, I'd be lying. It's that good.
• 86Box: If you've a hankering for running Windows 95/98, this is the way you want to go about it. Solid sound and 3d graphics emulation. Grab the Windows 98 Quick Install to make that machine with no driver hunting or difficulty.
• Frotz and Cool Retro Term: If you go back far enough to know what Feelies were, then you might want that experience of a curved tube display and the amber warmth of a good Infocom game. Running Frotz from within CRT will give you that, and both packages are an instant install on Homebrew, which is mandatory for a solid Mac. If you never lived through this, watch MC Frontalot sing about it, see if you're interested.
• Astris and AetherSX2 For the Switch and PS2, respectively.

Steam runs natively, and there's a surprising (but still not huge) number of titles that run native, and those are always going to run better. You can install Stream, GOG Galaxy, or other app stores into CrossOver and run that way, though.

Thus far, the most taxing thing I've run has been Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon which ran quite well.

The one down side I hit was controller support. Mac OS can be a serious pain to handle arbitrary controllers, and I ended up on an 8BitDo Ultimate which has worked flawlessly.

So to summate all of this, if I were in the market for the primary focus of gaming, this is not the choice, not even remotely.

But if you've got one, the possibilities are there. Have fun with it.