Windows GOG DOS Games on M-Series Macs
f055.net60 points by f055 3 hours ago
60 points by f055 3 hours ago
>install DOSBox for Mac
Mind you there are countless DOSBox forks out there and the vanilla original one is probably the least interesting one.
Nowadays the three most popular one would be DOSBox-X, DOSBox Pure, and DOSBox Staging
https://dosbox-x.com/ https://github.com/joncampbell123/dosbox-x
https://schelling.itch.io/dosbox-pure https://github.com/schellingb/dosbox-pure-unleashed/
https://www.dosbox-staging.org/ https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging
> there are DOSBox forks, most popular one would be DOSBox-X
Straight from the article:
> there are actively developed alternatives like DOSBox-X
> Mind you there are countless DOSBox forks out there and the vanilla original one is probably the least interesting one.
What do you want to be "interesting" about dosbox?
Last time i checked (and DOSBox hasn't made an official release since then) the vanilla DOSBox isn't able to run the game i made for an MS-DOS game jam a few years ago[0] because it doesn't implement RDTSC properly (that the game uses for timing). All currently developed DOSBox forks work properly.
Also the forks add some additional niceties, e.g. DOSBox Staging has some very nice CRT filters that basically make games look almost like the real thing (i have some actual CRTs to compare). DOSBox-X has a GUI to setup options while the emulator is running which is very convenient.
Read what the others offer
GUI config, load games from zip and image files, controller support, save states, various sound, graphics, and network enhancements etc.
There is more to this than simply being a DOS emulator.
> What do you want to be "interesting" about dosbox?
Quality of life improvements? Expanded (experimental) hardware support?
Heroic Launcher makes it even simpler, also for non-DOS Windows games (both very old and newer) - https://heroicgameslauncher.com/
But I wonder if Heroic can install HoMM2 on a Mac if no Mac binary is available on GOG.
This is why Rosetta 2's looming retirement sucks.
Is there an actual reason for it, apart from Apple hurrying devs along?
For the consumer, the benefits of backwards compatibility are obvious, but it’s sad that companies don’t see it as a selling point.
Well, we wouldn’t want anyone using their perfectly functional copy of Photoshop CS6 would we…
x86 gaming and running x86 Linux software are the exceptions.
> Starting with macOS 28, Rosetta 2 will be largely discontinued. Apple says that after that point, it “will keep a subset of Rosetta functionality aimed at supporting older unmaintained gaming titles, that rely on Intel-based frameworks.”
https://9to5mac.com/2026/02/16/macos-26-4-will-notify-users-...
It's the Mac native x86 software that hasn't been updated in most of a decade that would be affected.
> Retro gaming
What they say is "we will keep a subset of Rosetta functionality aimed at supporting older unmaintained gaming titles, that rely on Intel-based frameworks" which sounds like OS X games. But even if it is all-inclusive "retro" games, that means the 1,000s of contemporary games runnable via Crossover through Steam for Windows are being shut out.
They relented under pressure to continue allowing Linux virtual machines, so hopefully they continue to revisit this decision.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/abou...
That's an "I'll believe it when I see it working on my machine" matter.
As my sibling post says, it's more likely to work only for some older mac os native games.
This would be very bad for Wine too. I think Wine has some answer to this, since Wine does run on Android, but I think it won’t make the current easy path that is just brew install wine and be done.
I thought dosbox had its own x86 emulation layer so it should work fine on any arch?
Dosbox has its emulator to run DOS, but afaik dosbox binary that starts up dosbox on Mac uses Rosetta on M-series Macs, and without Rosetta it simply won’t start and emulate DOS.
Enjoy paying for your yearly Adobe subscription as your shrink wrap software won’t work.
I get why Apple wants to remove it but it genuinely sucks. I can't imagine it costs them a lot to put it into maintenance mode and just support 20 years of macOS games and apps going forward. They want developers to fully move to ARM but older titles or software whose developers have moved on/passed will be lost to the sands of time.
If they choose to discontinue it, it would be nice to have them opensource it so that the community could have a go at maintaining it tbh. Surely that's better than letting it rot (both rosetta and the old software that it runs).
That would be ideal, but given Apple's general hostility towards Open Source, it sounds extremely unlikely. I wonder what it would take to re-implement it. If it's "just software," I suppose there is a chance, not that I'm volunteering :)
I imagine that the area it takes up on the chip is non-trivial and so it'd cost them a ton to continue to have it.
I thought Rosetta 2 was a purely software layer
Rosetta 2 is software, but there are design decisions made for the M-series chips that are specifically made to improve the ability of Rosetta to work in a performant way. The main one I'm aware of is the x86-TSO memory-ordering mode - most ARM chips don't support this, but the M-series have it so that Rosetta can toggle it on for x86 emulation.
I'm not sure what the total cost of these are, but it's not zero.
There's another big one, 4K page support. The MMU can be told to set up a virtual address space with smaller, x86-compatible 4096-byte memory pages instead of the default 16384-byte pages.
Those are still needed for the Rosetta use-cases that are sticking around (old games, Linux binaries)
My favourite project to run these old games was Boxer (1). Based on dosbox, it creates a runnable self contained disk (app) for each game or set of games / software. It is pretty neat, but I am not sure if it has been maintained recently.
1 boxerapp.com
I do the opposite and put all games together, with DOS BAT-files to launch the games. I boot up my virtual dream DOS machine by just starting DOSBox-X and then I launch the games the way they are meant to be launched, from the DOS COMMAND.COM command-line. And as I mentioned in another comment, all of that is in one big DOS git repo.
Nice thing with DOSBox-X is there is a built-in command to set config parameters, so for games that require special settings or to slow down etc that can be set up from its launcher BAT file. All games share the same dosbox config file with default settings.
Boxer was wonderful in its day, I think it also became the basis of the official GOG Mac DOS game releases for a while too:
> https://www.gog.com/forum/general_archive/mac_dos_game_editi...
I've hoped for years someone would pickup the source and get it going again, it's essentially abandonware right now, no changes in nine years. The website is like a time machine back to the peak skeuomorphic mac app era. It still has the nicest UX of any of the DosBox variants I've tried. In this era of agentic rewrites, modernizing this app is probably the cheapest it has ever been too...
This is awesome, and I can't wait to have the time to set this up and install my GOG library .. but one thing has been bugging me for a long time about my GOG library, and that is: local multiplayer network gaming was awesome then.
So .. is there going to be any chance of getting multiplayer networking setup for some of the GOG's? Has anyone accomplished this in the DOXBox-*'en .app'o-sphere yet?
Dosbox-X has network support via NE2000 drivers.
Ooh, that is really great to know - thank you! I will start with that first ..
Is it really necessary to first install and copy from a Windows machine?
I never had any issues using WINE to install GOG games, but maybe running WINE on a Mac is not as easy now as it was back when I did that on a x86 Mac?
I always run the GOG installer in WINE and then copy the game into my git repo for DOS stuff, make sure the game works, git commit it, and then I know it will always just work and I will not have to think about that again (plus I can version manage all settings and save-games for all the games and also sync between my different machines without relying on any cloud service).
Hmm i guess this would require figuring out how to extract game data from an .exe installer GOG distributes. I guess AI would figure it out in like 3 minutes ;) I’ll check later.
You could try https://github.com/dscharrer/innoextract (installable via homebrew).