Highball Download

Highball › Your first game with Highball

Your first game

This page is for someone who has never used Highball, or anything like it. It takes you from an empty Mac to a Windows game on screen, and then through the one setting that fixes most games that start without a picture.

What Highball does

Windows games are made for Windows. Highball runs them on a Mac anyway, using Wine, which translates what the game asks of Windows into what macOS understands. You do not need a copy of Windows.

Highball keeps your games in a Windows environment, a folder that looks like a small Windows PC to the game. One environment is made for you on first launch and most people never need another.

Before you start

1. Install Highball

Download the app from the install page, drag it to Applications and open it. Press Get started. Highball downloads what it needs and prepares the Windows environment. It takes a few minutes, and you only do it once.

2. Get your games in

Press Install Steam and sign in with your Steam account when Steam's window appears. The very first start of Steam takes 15 to 25 minutes because it updates itself. Highball shows that it is working at the bottom of its window. Leave it alone until the sign-in window appears. Later starts are quick.

Your Steam games then show up in Highball's library. Install a game from Steam as you would on a PC. Epic games work too, through Connect Epic.

3. Check the verdict, then press Play

Every game in the library shows a verdict under its cover. Verified means it was run here, Community and Reported mean other players say it works, and Blocked means it cannot run on a Mac at all, usually because of an online game's anti-cheat. Click a game's name to open its page. The page says in plain words what will happen when you press Play, and any known problem with its fix. Then press Play. The round play button that appears on a cover under the pointer starts the game straight away.

4. When the game shows no picture

A black window, a white window, or a game that opens and closes at once almost always means the graphics mode does not suit that game. Highball can draw a game in several ways, and games differ in which one they like. When a game quits right away, Highball offers another mode for next time. Say yes and press Play again. When a game ran but looked wrong, answer Had problems when Highball asks how it went, and it offers the next mode the same way.

To choose yourself, open the game's page, open Advanced, and change Mode for this game. Try them in this order and press Play after each change.

  1. DXVK (Vulkan on Metal) for most older games and DirectX 9 or 11 games.
  2. DXMT (DirectX 11 on Metal) for DirectX 11 games, often the fastest when it works.
  3. Apple's DirectX 12 support for recent DirectX 12 games. Highball asks you to accept Apple's licence the first time.
  4. Wine's own Direct3D for very old games and small 2D ones.

The change applies to that game only. If a mode works where the game's page said nothing yet, send a report so the next player gets it automatically.

5. When a game asks for something Windows usually has

Some games need an extra Windows component, such as the .NET Framework or the Visual C++ runtimes. When Highball knows a game needs one, it installs it before the game starts. To add one yourself, open Settings (⌘,), then Environments, pick your environment and press Add next to Windows components. You can add the .NET Framework 4.8, the Visual C++ runtimes, Microsoft's core fonts, Japanese fonts and controller support there.

For anything else, right-click the environment, choose Full page, then Run a Windows program…, and pick the installer you downloaded.

6. Still stuck

The troubleshooting page covers the common problems. If your game is not there, open Settings, then Troubleshooting, and press Report a problem…, which opens a report with your Mac's details and a summary of your most recent game log already filled in. That summary usually shows the cause, so you rarely need to explain more than what you saw.