Playing Good Old Games on Apple Silicon

My daughter suddenly wanted to play Fallout 2 (do not ask me why). However, it seems impossible to run the game on a MacBook Air M1 by default.
The GOG version I bought a long time ago crashes instantly.

Getting the game

As everything is now on the cloud, I no longer have my Fallout 2 CD bought in the previous millennium. I bought it again on GOG a long time ago, so getting the game was just a matter of logging into the website and downloading the standalone version.

I did not want to use GOG Galaxy as I prefer standalone applications on my system.

Running the game

As soon as I started the game, nothing happened and the process crashed. I could not find anything relevant in the Console App nor in the game’s log.

I tried tinkering with the Wine settings, but nothing changed. I searched for quite some time on the GOG forums, but nothing really interesting came out of it.

Although I was against it, I also tried running GOG Galaxy, but the same thing happened.

Fans to the rescue

Searching Reddit, I discovered Mac Source Ports - Run old games on new Macs. As they say:

Mac Source Ports features native app builds of source ports of your favorite games for both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs, signed and notarized whenever possible.

So, going to the Fallout 2 related page, I:

  • downloaded the latest version of the Community Edition
  • put the binary in the game’s content downloaded from GOG, for example I put the downloaded version of the game in my home Applications directory:
/Users/jfyuen/Applications/Fallout\ 2.app/Contents/Resources/game/Fallout\ 2.app/Contents/Resources/drive_c/Program\ Files/GOG.com/Fallout\ 2/
  • just ran fallout2-ce.app
  • and voilà!

The game started directly, with no fiddling with configs or other things. I was really impressed with how smooth it was, and the game runs flawlessly in windowed or fullscreen mode.

Trying other games

As my daughter was interested in playing Fallout 2, I also downloaded other great RPGs of the same era from GOG:

  • Baldur’s Gate 1
  • Baldur’s Gate 2
  • Planescape Torment

At first, I tried the same thing as for Fallout 2: running them directly without any tweaks, but none of them started. I also looked at the forums a bit, but still found no solutions.

Going back to Mac Source Ports

Having had a good experience with Fallout 2, I searched for those games on Mac Source Ports… and there they were.
As all three games use the Bioware Infinity Engine, there is a single release implementation called GemRB for all of them.

To run all three games, the steps were:

  • download the latest GemRB release
  • locate the game source directory, on my system:
/Users/jfyuen/Applications/Baldur\'s\ Gate\ 2\ Complete.app/Contents/Resources/game/Baldur\'s\ Gate\ 2.app/Contents/Resources/drive_c/GOG\ Games/Baldur\'s\ Gate\ 2/
  • use it in the GemRB interface

And as with Fallout 2, the game worked on the first try. I was amazed.

Note: GemRB can also be run on the CLI with:

./Applications/gemrb.app/Contents/MacOS/gemrb Applications/Baldur\'s\ Gate\ 2\ Complete.app/Contents/Resources/game/Baldur\'s\ Gate\ 2.app/Contents/Resources/drive_c/GOG\ Games/Baldur\'s\ Gate\ 2/

The process was the same for Baldur’s Gate 1 and Planescape Torment.

On Steam

I also wanted to download Steam on my laptop via Brew. However, once the application was installed, it did not start. There were several problems:

  • Steam only provides an Intel version of their installer, so I had to install Rosetta via
softwareupdate --install-rosetta --agree-to-license
  • after that, the app still would not start. I had to clear the com.apple.quarantine permissions:
sudo xattr -rd com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Steam.app
  • finally, when starting, macOS complained that the binary was broken and had to be moved to the Trash. Once I selected “Move to Trash”, the application could finally autoupdate…

The process was a lot more tedious than I imagined. Maybe I should have just downloaded the version from their website without going through Brew… I expect it to be the same.

What about LLMs?

I have also asked ChatGPT about the following:

  • running Fallout 2 on Apple Silicon: it correctly suggested using Mac Source Ports
  • running Baldur’s Gate 2: it said that it would work fine and did not suggest anything else
  • Steam: it also failed to suggest a correct workaround

I guess at the time of writing, Google and forums (Reddit) still have an advantage!

Conclusion

A big thanks to the hardcore fans and to those who have reverse-engineered the game engines, allowing my daughter and me to play these wonderful games.