How to play steam windows games on mac?

[a slightly disappointing wrap]

Listen. Im not looking to play really CPU intensive games, just indie games. Does anyone know how to do it?

[slxpress]

This won't help you with indie games, but I use something called the Porting Kit.

Basically this guy develops custom Wine wraparounds (wine is a windows emulator for OSX) for each game he works on. You then buy the game from your platform of choice. The Porting Kit installs the Wine wraparound automatically, then you play the game by loading it from the Porting Kit menu.

He has a pretty extensive catalog for games. He's always adding new ones. You can request games to be added (I never have). There's a standard Steambuild Wine wraparound, but I haven't tried it, and it's likely your mileage may vary with it.

The other ways of running Steam windows games on a mac is through something called Bootcamp, which is a way of running windows on your computer from startup. It does require a reboot if you want to switch between windows and OSX or vice versa. There are a few programs which create a Windows environment within OSX. I use Parallels. While it's good for business applications, I've had issues with gaming.

Then there's Wine, which uses a windows emulator to run a game. But it does require quite a bit of fiddling to make it work for each game.

I'm not a computer savvy person. I use computers for work, and I know how to get around them for the most part, but I'm not a programmer and I don't have any real interest in becoming one. For any problems I count on Google or paying someone.

What I have found is that running windows games can be a hit or miss affair. The best way to run windows games is to get a windows computer. I constantly tell people if a major priority is to be able to play games on their next computer, get a windows computer. And I love Apple.

Aside from that, the next best solution I've found for someone who doesn't want to get their hands too dirty to be able to play a windows game is the Porting Kit solution I referred to above. He also talks about something called Crossover, but I've found the Porting Kit does what I need, and it's free, whereas Crossover costs money. I don't know how the developer makes money from the Porting Kit. I'm hopeful he gets some kind of commission from the links he provides to buy the games, but I've donated some money to him in the past if that happens not to be the case.

Here's a link to his site:

http://paulthetall.com/portingkit-2/

[a slightly disappointing wrap]

Thanks for that lengthy comment! I think first I will try to use the porting kit. The game which I really want is a old indie game (I think so most likely it should work.

I have tried use virtual machines before, but the good ones you have to pay for, and the free ones being annoying and fiddly to set up. Do you have any good free VMs?

[slxpress]

No. I use Apple for work as well, and needed an application which required the Windows OS to run. It made sense for me from a business perspective to pay for a VM.

What I'm telling you is that I also tried to use it for gaming purposes, and while it can run some games, the experience is inconsistent. That's for both Parallels and VMware.

The best experience I've had for me as a non programmer in getting Windows games to run on my mac is The Porting Kit.

[a slightly disappointing wrap]

Originally posted by slxpress:

No. I use Apple for work as well, and needed an application which required the Windows OS to run. It made sense for me from a business perspective to pay for a VM.

What I'm telling you is that I also tried to use it for gaming purposes, and while it can run some games, the experience is inconsistent. That's for both Parallels and VMware.

The best experience I've had for me as a non programmer in getting Windows games to run on my mac is The Porting Kit.

Ok, thanks for that. I think I will try that. However, would i be able to convert a windows game off of steam? is it the same concept?

[slxpress]

You choose the platform you want to download it from. There's video instructions to help with that. They seem to encourage downloading from gog.com because it's DRM free, but like I said, they have video instructions on how to buy it from Steam. I have Fallout, Fallout 2, and Fallout:NV through Steam, and they all work fine (I did have to get a different mouse, though, but that's often standard - the Apple "magic mouse" isn't exactly geared for gaming).

They've even got a generic Steambuild that allows you to try different games on Steam yourself with a generic wine wrapper. I haven't tried it out myself, but it's there.