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Why M1 Gamer?
Why we are doing this.
Why the emphasis on Stress Free Gaming?
The original idea for this site came from reflecting on how stressful it can be to be a Mac gamer, but at the same time the speed and efficiency of Apple Silicon Macs and incredible advances in Windows emulation can make running many, many games perfectly, if you just know how.
It was the best of times...
Quotes in this article are from the famous opening sentence of A Tale of Two Cities, a historical novel published in 1859 by English author Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. The novel tells the story of the French Doctor Manette, his 18-year-long imprisonment in the Bastille in Paris, and his release to live in London with his daughter Lucie whom he had never met. The story is set against the conditions that led up to the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror.
As Dickens's best-known work of historical fiction, A Tale of Two Cities is said to be one of the best-selling novels of all time.[2][3][4] In 2003, the novel was ranked 63rd on the BBC's The Big Read poll.[5] The novel has been adapted for film, television, radio, and the stage, and has continued to influence popular culture.
Even the earliest M1 processor was a huge step forward for running games well on a Mac. More than the processor—which was quite powerful and spectacularly power efficient—the architecture of built in GPU cores and memory shared between the GPU and system established a scalable, stable framework for game development.
With the new more powerful hardware, Apple reached out to the gaming community more than it had in the past, sponsoring ports of major AAA games, featuring them at Developer's Conferences and promoting them heavily in advertising and on the App Store.
After years of fitful support, Macs finally began to support a wide variety (particularly Sony and Xbox) controllers natively and reliably, opening up many games like first person open-world console types of games that were designed to be played that way. Global game mode support made full-screen games get full performance and reduced distractions.
Apple also began selling the Apple Arcade subscription service at a fairly small price, included in many family and other packages. Though oriented more toward mobile apps, it includes some really incredible games, particularly older indie games, that make the most of larger screens and controllers.
Finally, the power of high-end Mac laptops for rendering has meant that major platforms that are used to create games—most importantly Unity—have had the incentive to really tune their engines to run well on Macs. Meaning that native games, ones written directly for Macs, can take advantage of the full power of their built-in graphics, without losing some performance through emulation.
...It was the worst of times
The dichotomies thoughout point out a major conflict between family and love, hatred and oppression, good and evil, light and darkness, and wisdom and folly. Dickens begins this tale with a vision that human prosperity cannot be matched with human despair. He, in fact, tells about a class war between the rich and the poor. He also tells of a time of despair and suffering on one hand, and joy and hope on the other.
This is an apt phrase to be used in the context of today’s world when, on the one hand, the rich are enjoying luxurious lives; while on the other hand, the poor are struggling under the yoke of economic decline. However, its best context is only in literary writings where one country or situation is compared with another, in order to predict some revolution or sudden transformation. That is why in the context of the transformation in times, wealth, inequality, and accumulation of wealth have become modern themes which the author dilates upon in the opening of his novel. A political leader might use it in a speech, or a retiring school teacher might use it to remind his students the golden old times.
Well, in a word, nope. Though a few major games do get first class Mac support (thanks for Baldur's Gate 3, Larian!), and there's the Apple sponsored ports of great games (Lies of P, for one) but for most companies, for most games, it's just not a priority, for what is around 5% of the market, at best.
Many games use assets designed on Macs, but those games don't run on Macs. Some independent game developers make a point of delivering Mac versions, but for most, the return isn't worth the cost. Kickstarters sometimes dangle a Mac version down the road, as a stretch goal…
Despite being a robust platform, and delivering tools and top-of-line experiences when given the opportunity, Apple hasn't shifted the marketplace enough to change the reality that the majority of games coming out will never ship with a Mac native version.
It was the season of light...
In the Winter 2002 issue of the The Dickensian, someone named Stephanie Harvey sent a thrill through the little cosmos of Dickens studies with a short piece on Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky. In “Dickens’s Villains: A Confession and a Suggestion,” Ms. Harvey reported the discovery of a previously unknown, untranslated letter of the great Russian novelist, in which he told a friend about meeting Dickens in London, 1862. The richest section of the letter read as follows:
He told me [wrote Dostoevsky] that all the good simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even the holy simpletons like Barnaby Rudge, are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity toward those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite.
Immediately, Dostoevsky’s quotation just sounded right, and the delicious anecdote began making its way into authoritative studies and biographies. However, in the handful of years that followed, a number of scholars in nineteenth-century studies became suspicious of the new “letter,” eventually outing it as a fraud and Stephanie Harvey as a pseudonym—one of several—belonging to the sad mountebank scholar A.D. Harvey. The whole episode is luridly fascinating for a variety of reasons, one of which is the surprising ease with which so many believed Harvey’s ruse. Indeed, it was so believable because it told the truth—Dickens did somehow contain all his bad and good characters—and this startling fact lies at the heart of A.N. Wilson’s new study, The Mystery of Charles Dickens. Somehow the deepest darkness and the clearest light, the fiercest judgment and the easiest mercy, the most sardonic indignation and the cheeriest good humor, all spring from a common source in his novels. How does such a thing happen?
From Dwight Lindley, Light and Darkness in Dickens, Literary Matters
The darkness on the commercial native game market obscures an important reality: you can reliably run the Windows version of a lot of games—including recent releases—using Wine emulation.
Wine, an open source software project intended to run Windows executables directly by emulating the Windows environment has existed for more than 20 years, more targeted at the Linux community than Macs. Wine development has also benefited from the popularity of the Steam Deck, which created both the pressure on Wine to get better, but just as importantly, an economic incentive for game developers to actually care how their games run under Wine and minimize Windows dependencies.
Apple itself kicked the Wine on Mac community into overdrive by releasing 2 major versions of the Game Porting Toolkit, their additions to Wine, which dramatically improved the quality and stability of the baseline experience. Intended to show game developers how games could be perform if ported, the tools were so effective that enterprising Mac gamers quickly found out that many games could be run perfectly satisfactorily using the toolkit, without any game company support or involvement.
Third-party developers have responded with software that incorporate all of these advancements to make running Windows games with Wine much easier, led by the commercial product Crossover, which directly contributes to Wine development, but also many free or non-commercial products, including Whisky.
...It was the season of darkness
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” The line is infamous in English literature as Charles Dickens’ 1859 novel, A Tale of Two Cities, to frame the motif of duality throughout the seven monthly installments of the novel to-be. My first reading of A Tale of Two Cities was involuntary and laden with reading checks and times essays during my junior year AP Language class. While I’m not the biggest fan of male white-washed literature curriculums, Dickens centers the novel around the duality of good versus evil, order versus chaos, within the settings of the late 18th century London and revolting Paris (woah, the two cities) but drives the theme of how these contrasts are deceptive. And so, I only came to appreciate the opening lines during the quite recent second read in the backdrop of academic free will and churning news headlines of contradiction. The following lines of the opening paragraph set the tone of tension — a push and pull that has to give and brings me back to themes of protest as “it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, to was the epoch of belief, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”
Let them eat cake. It builds up to La Révolution and the reign of the guillotine as Dickens depicts the pre-French Revolution tension through rising heat, violence, and social injustice. Dickens’ descriptive language portrays a growing class conflict, impending massacre, and the aftermath of the revolution as the plot climax aligns with the height of the French revolt. Between London and Paris, the main characters Charles Darnay, an ex-french aristocrat looking to renounce his family title, and Sydney Carton, a brooding English lawyer, fall for fair Lucie Manette, a Frenchwoman dedicated to caring for her father after his 18-year-long imprisonment in Bastille. A love triangle churns amidst a hateful revolution of the people as the protagonists become collateral in the agenda of the French revolutionaries, and further dichotomies appear through character foiling and plot events that pair moments of revenge with the resolution of redemption and hope. Charles and Sydney are two men who are inverse images of each other. Despite the uncanny physical resemblance, Charles is a kind gentleman who gets the girl, and Sydney remains a self-loathing alcoholic who changes at an ultimatum of sacrifice.
From A Tale of Two Cities: Dichotomies in violence and justice
Wait, what about all that emulation stuff? Can't you just run Windows games?
Sometimes. And sometimes there's one frustrating issue. Or a strange tweak that needs to be made. Or it works right up until the critical moment where it doesn't.
And asking for support is…fraught. The moment you say you're playing under emulation, most official support is out of the question and even on more supportive communities, the "just buy a PC" chorus is standing by to mock your laptop, your problems or your limitations in understanding some pretty complex technology.
Start your own thing
It was the spring of hope
So out of all this contradiction, we'll help you get started, sort through how to play Windows games, and find the best Windows and native games on the App Store, Steam and more.
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