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 is in the works.
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. Darwine has since reached version parity with the main Wine tree, and all development now happens in WineHQ tree.
This is likely to make Wine more popular due to the large number of Mac users who need to interoperate with Windows at work, or want to play Windows games at home and school. Some people believe Apple might want to lend Wine (and Darwine) some support, since Wine for Mac OS X would benefit them -- switch to Mac and keep running your Windows apps. However, they have so far refrained from doing so, either to avoid offending Microsoft or for other reasons.
In any case, expansion of the potential user base is good news for Wine.
Current Status (x86)
Brief: Wine works beautifully (on Leopard at least, with nVidia 9400M graphics).
For Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6), see: Installing Wine on Mac OS X
(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).
- Apple's X11 has serious bugs in rootless mode, so x.org's X11 may be necessary.
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
Tasks
Quartz Driver: very rudimentary support through darwine patches
- Core Audio Driver: works
- 16 Byte Stack Alignment: work in progress
- Mach Kernel Workarounds and Exception Handling: needs a lot of work
- Debugger: does not work
Contents & Links
FAQs Have an unanswered question about Wine on Mac OS X? Ask here.
Installing Wine on Mac OS X How to download, install and set up Wine on Mac OS X.
Building the Mac OS X Wine Package How to create the Wine Mac OS X Package from scratch.
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.
Qemu-Darwin-user Qemu-darwin-user allows Mac OS X/Intel Applications to run on Mac OS X/PowerPC. It's Rosetta inversed and thus is also refered as Attesor.
- Compatibility Lists
See Application compatibility test results in the Application Database - AppDB.