Highball › Troubleshooting Highball on macOS

Troubleshooting

"Highball can't be opened because Apple cannot check it for malicious software"

Every Highball release since 0.1.0 is signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple. If you see this warning, the copy on your disk is not the copy that was published.

The usual cause is a third-party unarchiver. Sparkle, the update framework Highball uses, contains symbolic links inside its framework bundle. Some unzip tools write those links out as ordinary files instead, which breaks Apple's code signature, and macOS correctly refuses to open a bundle whose seal no longer matches. The file was fine when it left the server. The extraction broke it.

The fix: download Highball.dmg rather than the zip, and open it by double-clicking. The DMG is notarized and stapled, it needs no extraction tool, and it is the download every link on this site points to.

If you already have a broken copy, delete it, empty the Trash, and download the DMG again. Safari, Finder's Archive Utility, and ditto all handle the zip correctly if you prefer it; unzip and several popular third-party unarchivers do not.

macOS says Highball "includes a component that will not open in macOS 28"

Highball itself is a native Apple Silicon app. The Wine engine that runs your Windows games is Intel code, and so are the games themselves, and macOS translates both with Rosetta. The notice is macOS talking about that engine.

What Apple has said: macOS 27 keeps Rosetta in full. macOS 28, expected in the autumn of 2027, keeps it only for some older Mac games. Apple has not said how it decides which ones, and we do not assume Highball is among them.

Nothing in Highball can turn the notice off. Apple offers no switch for it, and CodeWeavers says the same to its own customers.

What this means for you: on macOS 27 and earlier nothing changes, and Highball is fully supported there. We will test Highball on the first macOS 28 beta the day Apple publishes it and write down what we find here. If your Mac must stay on the newest macOS, wait for that note before you update to 28.

What we are working on: an engine that does not need Rosetta. Apple added the system pieces for it in macOS 26.5, CodeWeavers has shown one working in a CrossOver preview, and Highball's engines are built from CodeWeavers' published sources, so we will follow when those sources are released. Such an engine will need macOS 26.5 or newer, will not use Apple's D3DMetal at first, and we have no date for it. We will not promise one until it runs your games on our test Macs.

The engine download stalls or never finishes

Highball reports live progress while it downloads an engine. If the progress stops moving for a minute, the transfer has stalled rather than hung: cancel it and start again, and it will resume. Partially downloaded engines are cleaned up automatically on the next attempt, so a failed install never leaves anything broken behind.

Steam takes a very long time on first run

Steam updates itself the first time it launches inside a fresh environment, and that first update is genuinely slow, often around twenty minutes. Highball shows it on the strip at the bottom of the window, with the range it usually takes, so you know the wait is expected. Leave it alone until it finishes. Later launches are normal speed.

A game launches to a black screen

Usually the renderer. Highball can run each game through DXVK, DXMT or Apple's D3DMetal, and titles differ in which one they tolerate. Check the game's page in the database for the renderer that has actually been confirmed; Highball uses that one automatically when the game has a row, and the game's page says which under "When you press Play". When a game quits right away, the alert offers the other mode. To set a mode by hand, open Settings, then Environments, then the environment's page. If you find one that works where the database says nothing yet, send a report.

Sound crackles or stutters in a game

Some games keep very little sound queued, and at 48 kHz the Mac asks Wine for more at a time than they have, so it plays short silences a few times a second. Open Audio MIDI Setup (in Applications, Utilities), select your speakers or wired headphones, set Format to 96,000 Hz (or 88,200 Hz), and restart the game. Measured with Counter-Strike 2 on an M4, that took two minutes of menu music from 324 dropouts to none (report). Bluetooth headphones and many monitors do not offer those rates.

The game refuses to start because of anti-cheat

If it uses kernel-level anti-cheat, it cannot be made to work. Here is why, and what your options are.

A controller is not recognised, or shows up twice

Wine sees a gamepad through two drivers on a Mac, the system HID path and SDL, and some games only work with SDL. From Highball 0.9.38 on, open the environment's page and apply the dependency "Controllers through SDL", then restart the environment. On an earlier version, set the same two values by hand with regedit inside the environment: under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\WineBus, add the DWORD values DisableHidraw = 1 and Enable SDL = 1. This is what fixed an unrecognised controller in Elden Ring (report).

Something else

Open an issue on GitHub, ask in Discussions, or on the Discord for a quick question. The app can prefill a bug report for you from the Help menu, including the log, which makes it much faster to diagnose.