Highball › Credits

Credits

Highball is a front end. Nearly all of the hard engineering that makes a Windows game run on a Mac was done by other people, most of them unpaid or underpaid. If you have money to spend on this ecosystem, spend it on them before you think about me.

What Highball is built on

• Wine — the compatibility layer everything here depends on. Most of its development is funded by CodeWeavers, who sell CrossOver. If you want commercial support, or you simply want to fund Wine directly, buying CrossOver is the most direct way to do it.
• Gcenx — packages the macOS Wine builds that Highball downloads, and maintains the Sikarugir engine line along with the Homebrew casks much of the Mac Wine world installs from. He takes Ko-fi.
• DXVK — Direct3D 9/10/11 over Vulkan, by Philip Rebohle and contributors.
• DXMT — Direct3D 11 over Metal, by Feifan He, developed for CodeWeavers and released under the LGPL. It is Highball's default renderer.
• MoltenVK — Vulkan over Metal, which is what lets DXVK exist on a Mac at all.
• Apple's Game Porting Toolkit — D3DMetal, turned on at the first game that needs it, after you accept Apple's licence.
• Legendary — the open-source Epic Games client that powers Highball's Epic library.
• ProtonDB and AreWeAntiCheatYet — the open datasets behind the predictions and the anti-cheat verdicts in the database.

How Highball uses this work

Highball's default engine is a pinned upstream release, Gcenx's Sikarugir build, checked against recorded hashes. Alongside it Highball builds its own opt-in Wine 11 engine from the Wine sources CodeWeavers publishes with CrossOver, under the LGPL, with a small patch series kept public in highball-engine. Each patch is sent upstream once verified and dropped once upstream ships it. Engine components Highball needs a stable address for are mirrored on its own release page, byte for byte and pinned by hash.

The compatibility database is deliberately open and reusable. Curated data is CC0, the ProtonDB-derived predictions carry ODbL as their source requires, and the anti-cheat data keeps its MIT notice. It is meant to be useful to anyone building in this space, including tools that compete with Highball.