Running DSB+ESB on M4 Mac Mini?

[Gambit37]

After months of research and deliberation, I'm (almost certainly) going to replace my PC with a M4 Mac Mini. I'm done with Windows.

But I am still tinkering with DSB and don't want to lose that.

So, would DSB run on an M4 Mac Mini using something like Wine or PortingKit?

[Sophia]

When I had a Mac, I did DSB development in VMware Fusion, but this was back when Macs used Intel architecture, so I don't know how it is going to work now.

[Dalamar]

I use wine on an M1Pro MacBook Pro.
I’ve been using it to play RTC for years successfully.
The issue is eventually Apple will kill support for Rosetta 2, which will disable wine to function if you update the OS to a version that does not include Rosetta 2 on a silicon Mac.

On the other hand there is “whiskey” which supports silicon Mac’s natively.. but development has ended and that developer (of whiskey) has recommended switching to crossover in lieu of the ending of whiskey development.

Crossover is a paid application that lets you run pc games on. Your Mac… and its works very well. I bought and use it to play games like Diablo 2 Resurrected and banished on my M1 Mac. Crossover also is updated regularly and has fantastic support. Though I’ve not tried to use crossover to run RTC, As
Mentioned earlier VM’s like Fusion will probably work too.
Good luck!

[Gambit37]

Thanks for the input Sophia and Dalamar.

I've got an M1 Macbook Air, so I'll attempt to run DSB on Wine using that.

A shame to hear about the demise of Rosetta 2. If that's the case, it seems prudent for me to keep my existing PC for gaming. (That said, it's too big and powerful for the games I play now, so I'll likely *downgrade* it!). I don't want to move to Windows 11, but if I have to keep a copy of it for a gaming machine, so be it.

[Gambit37]

New plan!

After starting the installer for Wine on my Macbook Air, and being warned that "Rosetta 2 is very hard to remove", I had a rethink.

I realised I was being a total idiot: I don't need to run DSB on the Mac Mini at all, I can instead keep my existing Mini PC Windows server and run DSB (and other old games) on that. It's on Windows 10 which is out of support in October, so I still need to decide what to do about that, but there seem to be a few options that avoid upgrading to Win11.

That means I can sell my powerful gaming rig entirely as I just won't need it: I'm not into modern games at all these days.

I also just discovered Mac Source Ports which should keep me happy with retro gaming.

[Ser Xav]

I’ve always taken a perverse pleasure in making sure in always running a super old and basic game on any new super powerful gaming pc I may have just built / upgraded to. It’s the only way.

[Gambit37]

So after a lot of tinkering, I've ended up with a solution: Parallels Desktop for Mac.

This was the only solution that would run DSB at full speed on a virtualised Windows on the Mac.

I tried running DSB through Crossover: it worked, but my DM Redux custom dungeon would hang for a minute during the "custom scripts" part of the startup sequence which makes it unusable. I also tried UTM with a Windows 10 virtual machine and that had the same +1 min hang at startup.

The only VM that doesn't hang is Parallels, in fact it seems to start DSB faster than my big gaming PC did (which is now in pieces to be sold on eBay!) The downside of course is that Parallels is not free, but it's currently 35% off (£60 quid for the next year) which is a good incentive to get back to work on DM redux and complete it within the year...

It remains to be seen how DM redux development will go using this setup, but it's looking positive.

I've retired my gaming rig and home server and will be selling them on ebay.

Amazing that I can do everything* I need to on this tiny Mac Mini, and simplify my desk and office in the process. I'm absolutely delighted!

*Gaming on a Mac is still a mess. But if I want to play a game that's not supported on the Mac Mini, I'll just buy it through Steam and use to Geforce Now to stream it. I'm not really gaming these days anyway so I doubt I'll ever do that, but it's an option if Half Life 3 ever does get finished and released...