by Jason Snell
My Windows white whale now runs on my Mac
Last month, Dan wrote about getting PC games up on Mac using Apple’s game porting toolkit and the Wine API translation tool, all via an easy to use free app called Whisky.
This inspired me to give Whisky a try with my own white whale, a game that I’ve played in emulation for more than a decade—Diamond Mind, a venerable baseball simulation with legendary statistical accuracy. A colleague1 and I have drafted teams and played entire fictional league seasons in Diamond Mind. But keeping those emulators running over the years has sometimes been more work than it was worth to keep playing.
I gave Whisky a shot, and created a bottle with minimal settings—I only need Windows XP compatibility!—and installed Diamond Mind right off an installer EXE on my Mac hard drive. After some churning and learning and re-loading… up came Diamond Mind. No Windows emulator needed. Right on my Mac.
Sure, there are rough edges—you’ve still got to manage files in the Windows way, and I’m skeptical that network play will work—but… this thing runs. I was keeping an old Surface Go around just to play Diamond Mind! Goodbye to all that. Thanks, Dan, and thanks, Whisky.
- Yes, it’s Philip Michaels. ↩