Macintosh / Mac / macOS Support 2024

Kaytis

Kaytis

Active member
The interesting parts to me are that Game Porting Toolkit is just a very old version of wine that Apple upgraded to work in 64-bit architectures and to which they added extensions that route graphics calls to their native Metal APIs. I am sure that newer versions of wine owe at least some of their 64-bit support to the work that Apple must have contributed back to the project.

The clear advantage of the Game Porting Toolkit are the Metal extensions. They take advantage of hardware support that the open source wine code does not. One significant advantage is that it offers DX11 support. The latest version of wine only offers DX9 support. There is a clear improvement in many aspects of the rendering when the DX11 options are enabled. Shadows and atmospheric effects are significantly more sophisticated. Using the hardware acceleration makes rendering silky smooth. However, antialiasing is broken. In DX11 it discolors and washes out the entire environment. Not being able to use it is definitely a step back from DX9.

I never used anti-aliasing in DX9. Mainly because I forgot to turn it on. Now that I see it, I kind of want to keep it. But I will use the Game Porting Toolkit for a while to see how it goes.
 
Yulrem

Yulrem

Legend of the Troubled
Great, thank you very much for breaking it down!

Let me know when your version is ready to be installed and I'll give it a go.
 
Kaytis

Kaytis

Active member
I have transitioned the information in this thread into a ddowiki page: https://ddowiki.com/page/DDO_on_MacOS

There you will find the latest information about how to install and play DDO on macOS.

NEW: April, 2025
  • Added information about how to install Apple's Game Porting Toolkit
  • Personalization information has been moved out of the Launcher Script
  • Added support for Dungeon Helper to the Launcher Script (installation instructions aren't quite ready yet).
  • The Launcher Script has been cleaned up a lot. Cruft from its Window's origins have finally been removed.
 
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Ying

Ying

5000+ hours played
Very thorough info, and I appreciate you including DungeonHelper. What limitations, if any, exist within DDO when using the Game Porting Toolkit?
 
Yulrem

Yulrem

Legend of the Troubled
Ying said:
Very thorough info, and I appreciate you including DungeonHelper. What limitations, if any, exist within DDO when using the Game Porting Toolkit?
Click to expand...
Non so far. Except antialiasing is not working properly yet.
 
Kaytis

Kaytis

Active member
Ying said:
Very thorough info, and I appreciate you including DungeonHelper. What limitations, if any, exist within DDO when using the Game Porting Toolkit?
Click to expand...
It's a complicated mix of factors. I explain it very thoroughly on the wiki page, but here are the pros and cons:

Game Porting Toolkit 2.0:

Pros:
  • Supports DX-11: more graphic options available -noticeably better quality with textures and shadows.
  • Uses built in hardware for graphics rendering via special drivers that Apple includes.
Cons:
  • Very complicated to install. If you dont understand what is happening, you had better follow the instructions to the letter.
  • Uses Wine 7 which is positively antique.
  • Because of the former, does not support Dungeon Helper at all.
  • Enabling any antialiasing causes the screen to wash out. You can see stuff, but it's like looking through a barely transparent plastic bag.
Wine 10:

Pros:
  • Very easy to install. A breeze compared to GPT.
  • Supports Anti-aliasing.
  • Supports Dungeon Helper.
Cons:
  • Only supports DX-9.
  • Graphics rendering is all emulated (On Apple Silicon this isn't a problem -I can run 6 clients without any degradation).
I steer people in very forceful terms to using the standard Wine installation. I only left the Graphics Porting Toolkit instructions there in case some enterprising person discovered an update worth looking at. It seems that @Yulrem has found something. I will investigate. If Apple has managed to modernize the underlying Wine, resolved the antialiasing flaws, and made GPT easier to install, then this may be a huge win. I will spend some time validating the new kit and if all goes well, will simplify the wiki page by switching to GPT 3. My biggest concern is that it is still going to be complex to install -especially if they did not move to Wine 10. Wine 7 is not supported on Apple Silicon -it has to be emulated, which is what makes installation complicated. Fingers crossed.
 
Yulrem

Yulrem

Legend of the Troubled
As far as I can tell...
- It's still wine 7.7
- Antialiasing improved but still flawd and looks work in progress.
- The current version 3.0 is still beta1 so all could improve in the stable.
 
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Kaytis

Kaytis

Active member
I have discovered that all Wine versions past the original 10.0 version will not launch DDO due to a video driver issue. At least on my machine and I am assuming others. I will work with the Wine owners to see if this can be resolved. In the meantime, if you have accidentally updated Wine, or installed it after April 22nd and are unable to launch DDO, please follow the instructions on the wiki to downgrade to Wine 10.0: 1.1.2 Installing the 'wine' framework. These instructions will uninstall whatever version of Wine you have installed and specifically install Wine 10.0.

Be sure to grab the new launcher script as well. It is no longer personalized, so just replace the text in the one you already have:
 
G

Gepiter

New member
Thanks for posting the way to use Wine 10.0. The game works again, now.

With Wine 10.0_2, I got this error when starting the DDO Launcher: 'failed to find a suitable graphics device.'
 
Kaytis

Kaytis

Active member
Yes. People from Codeweavers are changing the code to perhaps do a little bit of what Game Porting Toolkit started. Wine 10.0_1 and Wine 10.0_2 "accidentally" picked up these changes, when they really should have been code neutral. They are switching from the OpenGL layer to the "Vulkan" layer for GPU emulation which has caused problems for DDO. It turns out that there is a flag that will force OpenGL, and it works all the way through Wine 10.9. I will update the instructions to utilize this flag instead of jumping through the current hoops.

Code: 
export WINE_D3D_CONFIG="renderer=gl"

I am able to cross compile Wine on my Mac and I have isolated the breaking change to a specific commit. I have a bug report in to WineHQ, but will continue to investigate the code change to figure out if there is an easy fix (I doubt it will be easy unfortunately).
 
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Kaytis

Kaytis

Active member
The Wine team found the issue that was preventing DDO and, as it turns out, LotRO from working. They have corrected the code in the current development version and I have confirmed that it works. I will leave the macOS instructions as they are for now until the next stable version of Wine is released, after which it will be safe to simply:
Code: 
brew install --cask --no-quarantine wine-stable
again.

Those that want to test can:
Code: 
brew uninstall wine-stable
brew install --cask --no-quarantine wine@devel
to see for themselves. If anything goes south, you can:
Code: 
brew uninstall wine@devel
and follow the instructions in the ddowiki to get back to the working stable version.
 
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