Highball
Highball
Run your Windows games on Apple Silicon. Free, open source, and honest about what works — down to which renderer each game needs.
Download for macOS Check your game
notarized .dmg · auto-updating · Apple Silicon · macOS 14+ · GPL-3, no paid tier ever
First run takes about 20 minutes while the engine downloads and Steam updates itself. After that, launching is instant.
How it works
No Windows licence, no virtual machine, no CrossOver, and nothing to configure by hand.
Install Highball
A notarized Mac app. On first run it downloads a Wine engine for you, verified against a recorded checksum.
Bring your games
Install Windows Steam with one click, or connect your Epic account. Your existing libraries, not new purchases.
Play
Each game shows what the database knows about it. Where a verified fix exists, Highball can apply it for you.
Steam and Epic, ready to play
A verified Wine engine is assembled from pinned, checksummed upstream releases. Steam installs with one click; your Epic library connects and plays through the open-source Legendary client. .NET and VC++ runtimes are one click too.
Your library, with answers
Every game carries a verdict: verified, reported, predicted or blocked. Portal 2 froze on every map load until the cause was traced to a MoltenVK bug in Source's HDR path; the recipe now turns HDR off for you and it runs at 210 fps. Six games have a fix like that so far.
A database, not a promise
Every claim carries its provenance, and its date where one exists: verified on real hardware, reported upstream, or derived from ProtonDB crossed with anti-cheat data. Browse it — it's yours to reuse.
No account, no telemetry
Highball asks for no login, phones nothing home, and keeps every environment on your own disk. The app is GPL-3 and the data is open; neither can be taken away later.
Tuned where it counts
Launches use the faster in-process synchronisation path where the game tolerates it, which is worth real frame rate on CPU-bound titles. Frame caps and async shader compilation are one toggle away.
Not tied to one Wine build
Engines are defined in a manifest and pinned by hash: a community Wine 10 build by default, and Highball's own Wine 11 build from CrossOver's published sources, with every patch public. Switching engine is a setting, never a rewrite.
Verified on real hardware
20 games tested by hand on Apple Silicon, 18 reported upstream, 353 from community consensus, 47 honestly marked impossible — plus 12,491 predictions.
Aperture Desk JobAssetto CorsaCloverPitContractVilleCounter-Strike 2Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (Legacy)
The honest part
Kernel anti-cheat cannot work. Valorant, Fortnite, Destiny 2, Call of Duty and friends load Windows kernel drivers that no compatibility layer can provide, on any Mac, in any app. Highball flags them before you download 80 GB — and explains exactly why rather than leaving you to find out.