- Apple is starting to take gaming seriously with the new Game Porting Toolkit for macOS.
- Similar to Proton on the Steam Deck, this feature allows you to play non-native games in an emulated environment on the fly.
- People are already using it to game, but it will be a while before this becomes a “set it and forget it” tool.
Out of the box, the Steam Deck runs on a special version of Linux. If you hadn’t used one, you’d assume that many games designed exclusively for Windows wouldn’t work with it. However, through the magic of services like Proton and Wine, the Steam Deck can “translate” Windows games on the fly. This allows you to fire up a game and play it without any configuration or prep, and nine times out of ten, everything will work great. Sure, some games won’t work correctly, but they will be the exception rather than the norm, thanks to all the work Valve has done to make the Steam Deck simple and easy to use (and incredibly successful).
Now, Apple is trying to do something similar with macOS (via The Verge). The company has created a tool called Game Porting Toolkit. It does basically the same thing the Steam Deck does: it allows you to play a game not designed for macOS on a macOS-based system. Using the power of Apple’s M1 and M2 silicon, macOS uses a combination of emulation and code translation to instantly convert things like Direct3D and APIs related to the keyboard, mouse, controller input, audio playback, etc., to something a Mac understands.