10.11　NotProton is Kiiind of a Game-Changer for Gaming on Mac

macOS and gaming. They go together like... cats and... teaching them to do tricks. Everybody loves cats, I love cats, I even like other people's cats. I even like owning cats even they shit in a box, don't really understand what you're saying and generally just make my house smell like cat.

One thing we can all agree on: you can't really train a cat the same way you can train a dog, and in that vein you couldn't really enjoy playing modern PC games on macOS (OS X?).

Sure, there have been a robust suite of emulators available for the platform, wh-which I guess it kind of like... uh, a cat sitting on your lap? It provides you with a nice warmth and nostalgia-like comfort, but for the longest time the cat would only purr out OpenGL... in a very cat-move, instead of adopting the Vulkan API, Catpple decided to jump off your lap, show you their butthole and go develop the Metal graphics API instead...?

I'm abandoning the metaphor.

Anyway, despite macOS being kind of shite at games for the longest time, of course Steam shipped a macOS client catering to those rare developers who went above and beyond to make their games compatible with things other than DirectX. It's an incredibly small part of the market, but hey at least had the blessings of Terraria and Stardew Valley. That's sumthing.

Since the early naughts, people much smarter and much more talented than me have been working hard at cracking this wall, there's been a series of developments where it seems like we have finally reached a point where the walls are crumbling. Although... you may still need a more powerful Mac in order to enjoy some of the more powerful games. Sorry bub.

The Brief Introduction on Crossover

Crossover, the software suite from the geniuses over at Codeweavers, has done a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of running Windows apps on Mac (and Linux) since time immemorial. They contribute heavily to the WINE open source project, as well as working with Valve on Proton. If you don't know, both WINE and Proton are incredibly powerful tools at running Windows games and applications on non-Windows operating systems. The world of technology would be a darker place without Codeweavers, frankly; if you're not interested in the direction Windows 11 is going and you jump ship to Linux, you have these people to thank for keeping your Steam library with you.

Crossover is of course paid software, although supporting this project is worth it in my estimation. Moreover I believe they offer the source code, so interested people can always compile from source (how many actual Mac users would rather compile from source than throw money at the problem, anyway?). But I digress.

TLDR: Crossover is software that runs Windows games and applications on macOS and Linux.

Hi NotProton!! How are you!?!

The latest breakthrough pairs Crossover with a new open-source project called NotProton. This application essentially patches the native macOS Steam client to enable the Steam Play section in the properties window of a game: a native feature on the Linux Steam clients. If you haven't used Steam on Linux yet, this is where Proton and all of the translation-layer magic lives. I should also mention, NotProton also patches the macOS client to be able to download all of your Windows titles as well. Very cool! Thanks NotProton!

Setup was actually fairly painless, but in the interest of not giving outdated information though, I'd recommend following the instructions on the main GitHub page. It seems like they just added a homebrew cask too, which you can install by running this command in Terminal...

brew install --cask notprotonnot/notproton/notproton

If you don't know what that means, don't worry about it. Follow the instructions and download from the Releases tab.

Again, part of using NotProton also necessitates buying Crossover. You're required to install at least the stable or preview build (preview recommended at the time of writing). Crossover does cost a chunk of change, but it also goes on sale during CyberMonday and there's an education discount available as well. It's well worth supporting the developers, in this case, I feel.

Essentially, where as on Linux, the Steam Play section lets you choose between various versions of Proton, NotProton patches the SteamClient to show you Crossover.

There are a few options here. If you don't know, FEX is Valve's solution to translating games coded for normal PC architecture to the architecture your M-Series Mac runs. This may prove better in the long run since Valve has more interest in supporting the development of FEX, but in the meantime choose Rosetta: Apple's implementation of translating architecture instructions. It's just a bit more stable here in the meantime.

The NotProton developers also recommend you go into Steam's Settings (general settings, not per-game settings) and under the new Compatibility tab, set Rosetta as the default.

It's also suggested to only switch between Rosetta and FEX in the settings as needed. If a game isn't running correctly, try FEX! When you switch between the two, you end up having to rebuild the prefix for that game in NotProton. It's not going to erase your save, but it is a bit of a pain. Close Steam, rebuild prefix in NotProton, relaunch Steam and try again.

Once you let you let the game download and give it a couple seconds to set up though, if it's compatible with Crossover it should just run.

Most games I've tested under Crossover in the past have worked great! Granted, I tend to play newer indies and avoid modern AAA releases. It's possible some more graphically intense games may fail to run. For whatever reason, the 10 year old Blazblue Centralfiction would always crash to desktop before the title screen-- probably missing some Windows related dependency or other. I dunno. Your milage may vary.

meow meow meow meow (the conclusion)

NotProton, in combination with Crossover offers a much needed native experience for downloading and managing Steam titles on macOS. Which I don't think it's perfect yet, I think this solution is a lot better than the previous iterations, which required you to run Steam through Crossover itself, which was never going to run the client as well as the macOS build was.

Okay, that's all the time I got. I gotta get back to playing Animal Crossing: New Leaf on my Nintendo 3DS.