In April 2025, Whisky (an app many people used to run Windows games on a Mac) was discontinued. Its developer was honest about why: keeping a Wine frontend working, alone, against every macOS update and every new game engine is a treadmill that burns people out. The prebuilt runtimes it depended on started going offline one by one not long after.
Fifteen months later, “just use Whisky” still tops old Reddit threads, and the people who land on them have four real options. Here they are, honestly, including where ours falls short.
CrossOver: you still do the work
CrossOver is the commercial face of Wine, and it’s good software with a real compatibility team behind it. It still hands you the hard part: you create “bottles,” pick Windows versions, toggle D3DMetal vs DXMT vs DXVK, and debug the black screen yourself when a setting is wrong. If you enjoy that, CrossOver is a fine tool. Most people don’t enjoy that.
Sikarugir: powerful and proudly manual
Sikarugir (formerly Kegworks, descended from Wineskin) is a community power-user option, and we’re glad it exists. It gives you every knob: engine versions, graphics backends, per-app wrappers. That’s also the catch: you are the compatibility team. It’s the right choice if you like building things; it is not one-click, and it doesn’t tell you whether your game will work before you spend an evening finding out.
Game Porting Toolkit: for developers, not players
Apple’s GPTK (now in its fourth major version) is genuinely impressive translation technology, but it ships as a developer tool: Homebrew, Terminal, no game library, no per-game configuration. The projects that wrapped it nicely have mostly stalled or gone commercial. If you’re a developer evaluating a port, use it. If you want to play Lethal Company tonight, it’s the long way around.
Pixel Port: what we built instead
We rebuilt the thing that actually died with Whisky: a modern, maintained Mac runtime (Wine with DirectX-to-Metal translation, running on Apple Silicon) and then added the part every tool above is missing: the answer before the download.
Every game in our catalogue carries an honest tier. Verified means it ran on a real Apple Silicon Mac, ours or the network’s, and we publish what we measured. Unsupported means it will never work (kernel anti-cheat, mostly) and we say so instead of taking the download. One click: connect Steam, press Install & Play, and the setup (runtime, graphics backend, launch flags) is composed for that specific game. No bottles. No settings to guess.
The honest caveats, because they’re the point: Pixel Port is in beta and has rough edges. It’s Apple Silicon only (M1 or newer, macOS 14+), so no Intel Macs. You need to own your games: it runs the Steam copy you already own, and it doesn’t sell, bundle, or pirate anything. And yes, it’s Wine underneath, standing on the same open-source shoulders as everything else on this list. What you’re choosing between is who does the configuration work: you, or the software.
Pixel Port is built for the long term, with a maintained runtime and a compatibility catalogue that improves from real launches. Your games remain your Steam copies either way.