It's not been a week since the keynote at WWDC 2023 announced a bunch of updates, including the Vision Pro, but one new feature coming to the Mac is already making plenty of gamers excited.
Available to download from GitHub, you can move a certain game's contents into a folder that Whisky will recognize, and using the Game Porting Kit in macOS Sonoma, the game should run as it does on a Windows PC.
For those unaware, 'Game Porting Kit' wraps a game into an app that macOS can read and runs it like any other game that's native to the platform. It's similar to Rosetta 2, which enables apps on Intel Macs, to be used on an Apple silicon Mac.
The creator of this tool showed Cyberpunk 2077, a game not released on Mac, running with High settings on an M1 MacBook Pro via Reddit.
It's early days, but the fact that this is running well with no game-breaking glitches is nothing short of impressive, and it opens the field to what other games could run on macOS through Whisky.
This toolkit sets a new frontier for macOS gaming
We're going to be testing Whisky with a bunch of games in the coming days, but already, iMore contributor Matt Birchler has been using the toolkit to get Diablo IV, a game released this week (June 6), working on his M1 Pro MacBook Pro.
The fact that this is working at all is impressive by itself, but the fact that it's relatively simple to get games like Diablo IV working, albeit with some command lines needed through Apple's Terminal app, makes you wonder what's possible.
Could we start to see games like Resident 4 Remake and Street Fighter 6 working through Whisky and other methods in the coming weeks? And these tests are coincidentally from a MacBook Pro - we've yet to see how these games could really work on an M2 Ultra Mac Pro.
Granted, it's very early days, but seeing these games run two days after the keynote is something you wouldn't have expected to see last week, let alone last month. But it's important to mention that, for now anyway, these methods can't be used for shipped games, per the D3D Metal license.
So time will tell as to how users will try to refine these methods of getting Windows games onto macOS through Game Porting Kit and Whisky - but it's clearly an exciting time if you're a gamer and you've been feeling left out on the Mac in recent years.
