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History

Darwine was the original effort to port Wine to Macs Running OSX and consisted of 2 major efforts:

1. PowerPC Macs - attempted to integrate QEMU into Wine for x86 CPU emulation. This is NO LONGER ACTIVELY DEVELOPED. The QEMU user mode is now specifically documented for running stock Wine on non-Intel x86 chipsets.

2. Intel x86 - Wine for Mac OSX x86 has now merged into main Wine project, here at WineHQ.

Darwine has merged back into the WineHQ codebase, but the project has maintained some Intel Mac OSX packages for Wine on the Darwine Sourceforge.

PowerPC Mac

In 2002, the OpenDarwin people created the Darwine project to integrate the processor-emulator QEMU with a Mac OS-compatible version of Wine in order to run Win32 EXEs on PowerPC. The group succeeded in porting Wine from ELF to Mach-0. Integration of the x86 emulator was not worth the trouble of byteswapping (big endian <-> little endian), which was too much work.

• Qemu-Darwin-user allows Mac OS X/Intel Applications to run on Mac OS X/PowerPC. It's conceptually similar to doing the opposite of Rosetta and was therefore referred to as "Attesor".

• Older Macs using PowerPC processors are incompatible with code compiled for x86 (Intel and AMD) processors, unless the code is run under CPU emulation. Wine Is Not a (CPU) Emulator, nor does it include one.

Intel Mac

When Apple announced that Mac OS X was moving to the x86 platform, the Darwine group, along with AlexandreJulliard and KenThomases of CodeWeavers, began working on an x86 version. Code from Darwine was merged into the main Wine tree. All development now happens in WineHQ tree.

Current Status (x86)

Brief: Wine works well on OSX for Intel based Macs minus a proper distribution package (Mac Application Bundle) to fully integrate with "drag and drop" and "open" or "open with" functionality. Wine also has shortcomings with desktop icon integration and execution of certain types of DOS or blended Windows/DOS programs.

see FAQs or Tasks for further details

Installation

Download and install a precompiled binary package

There are currently no official prebuilt Wine packages for Mac. Hopefully someone will volunteer to maintain a release so they will be added (see the Wine download page for most up-to-date links and additional information).

3rd Party Apps

There are some 3rd party Apps that have pre-built binaries. These are NOT supported by winehq.org... You must get support from their creators.

Some common ones are that are known to use standard Wine source are Wineskin, WineBottler, and PlayOnMac.

All 3rd party apps are listed on the Third Party Apps page

Compile Wine

It is strongly recommended that one use either MacPorts or Fink to install WINE on OSX. Both support the current releases of OSX -- Mountain Lion (10.8.x).

See Building Wine on MacOSX

See building Wine from scratch

Prerequisites/Dependencies

NOTE: The MacPorts installation of WINE will automatically install any necessary Dependencies for a WINE installation.

See Mac Prerequisites/Dependencies

Uninstalling Wine

• Remove the source tree and binaries.

Using MacPorts, uninstall the wine package you previously installed:

sudo port uninstall wine

Replace wine with wine-devel if you installed the development version.

Using Fink:

fink remove wine

Replace wine with wine-dev if you installed the development version.

Otherwise and if you used sudo make install, revert it:

sudo make uninstall

Then simply delete your local Wine source code directory:

rm -rf src/wine

• Clean-up pseudo C: drive and registry entries as well as all programs installed to C:

rm -rf $HOME/.wine

• Check the hidden directory $HOME/.local/ where Wine stores some desktop menu entries and icon files as it interoperates with the X.Org Foundation and the Free Desktop.

rm -rf $HOME/.local

Files in this directory are unused on MacOS unless you use a UNIX window manager and other X11 applications instead of the native MacOS apps.

Todo / Tasks

• Distribution Package
  • "App" File/Folder containing all Wine binaries and contents of ~./wine folder
  • Drag and Drop EXE execution
  • Single/Double click "Open" using Wine for DOS/Windows Programs
  • Right click "Open With" for Wine
• vm86 replacement - required for 16 bit operations

Contents & Links

• FAQs Have an unanswered question about Wine on Mac OS X? Ask here.

• Compatibility Lists - See Application compatibility test results in the Application Database - AppDB.

  • AppDB Test Results for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger

  • AppDB Test Results for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

• Theme

CategoryDistributions

(Obsolete) Notes:

• Make sure to disable gcc optimizations when building since gcc has a stack realignment bug (this seems to have been fixed in Xcode 2.4).
• Tiger and earlier Leopard X11 versions have serious bugs in rootless mode, so X11 from xquartz.macosforge.org or macports.org may be necessary.

• Quartz Driver Quartzdrv is meant to replace Wine's x11drv on Mac OS X. Quartzdrv allows Wine to use Mac OS X built-in graphics routines.

• If you want to utilize Xquartz's (X11) underlying OpenGL implementation it might be necessary to set "Emulate Virtual Desktop" in Graphics settings using winecfg.

• If you are using macport's Wine, in order to use the correct libs you might need to start wine like this:

•   DYLD_FALLBACK_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/X11/lib wine ./my.exe