Highball
Which renderer to use
Highball can run each game through three different Direct3D translation layers. This is what the database knows for this title — empty rows are open questions, not failures.
| Renderer | Verdict | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| DXVKDirect3D 9-11 over Vulkan | Untested | no report yet — send one |
| DXMTDirect3D 11 over Metal | Untested | no report yet — send one |
| D3DMetalApple's Game Porting Toolkit | Reported | 1 report |
No dated Highball run yet. When one lands it records the renderer, the engine build and the macOS version it was seen on — which is what stops a verdict quietly rotting. Send one.
Notes
Doesn't play well yet in one report on an M1, the GOG copy. On the Wine 11 engine r30 with athei's x87sidecar on it gets in game, but the opening logo and the talking heads slow to a crawl in every graphics mode, with the Overseer's voice garbled. The GOG copy's high resolution patch draws through Direct3D 9. Fallout Community Edition (github.com/alexbatalov/fallout1-ce), an open source rebuild of the engine, has a native Mac app that uses the game's own data files, and it runs the reporter's copy. It's a 32-bit game.
Known issues
Slows to a crawl a moment into the opening logo, with every graphics mode (M1, Wine 10 r28 and Wine 11 r28). On Wine 11 r30 with the x87 sidecar the logo starts at full speed and the game can be reached, but it crawls again later, at the Overseer's talking head, whose voice is garbled
What helps none known. The x87 sidecar on r30 helps at the start but not further in, in DXMT, WineD3D and DXVK mode alike (highball-db#862, 2026-11-07). Fallout Community Edition runs the game's data natively on a Mac. With DirectSound disabled the game stops before opening a window, so it needs sound to run (highball-db#862, 2026-11-08). The reporter plays Fallout Community Edition
Why not diagnosed. The logo and the talking heads are both played in step with their sound, and the crawl comes with garbled speech, which points at the sound path rather than the drawing (a guess, highball-db#862)
DXVK mode draws the picture zoomed in (M1, Wine 11 r30, the GOG copy with its high resolution patch)
What helps WineD3D mode gets the resolution right
Why not diagnosed
Provenance
Reported by udance4ever (highball-db#862, 2026-11-01), Apple M1, macOS 27.2, Highball 0.10.23, engine x64-sikarugir10.0_6-r28, D3DMetal, rated 2 of 5 after 1 minutes: the opening logo plays at 120 fps and then slows to a crawl, the same with every graphics mode and all four of its launch options, the GOG copy. Not verified by the maintainer. udance4ever again in a comment on highball-db#862 (2026-11-03), in a Wine 11 environment on engine x64-crossover26.3-r28: on DXVK the logo still slows down. On D3DMetal and DXMT it slows down too and the window doesn't come up at the right size, and on WineD3D the game hangs, where on the Wine 10 engine it ran. The run was meant to try athei's x87sidecar, but the log has no sidecar attach line, so the sidecar wasn't active. udance4ever again on highball-db#862 (2026-11-04) tried FunkyFr3sh's cnc-ddraw with ddraw=n,b, without saying yet whether the logo still slows down. Those runs' logs show Wine's fixme lines, so the environment's WINEDEBUG reached Wine and replaced Highball's default, but no DLL load lines, which fits the quoted value " loaddll” seen in the same environment the next day (highball-db#993): Wine reads it as a channel name that doesn't exist. Highball 0.10.25 removes a ROSETTA_X87_PATH set by hand and sets it only itself, when the environment has HB_X87SIDECAR=1 and its engine ships the sidecar (the Wine 11 engines r30 and r31, Highball 0.10.26), so a hand-set path never reaches Wine there. That, not the variable's spelling, is why the sidecar never attached in the 2026-11-03 run. udance4ever again on highball-db#862 (2026-11-06), the Wine 11 engine r30 with athei's x87sidecar switched on (HB_X87SIDECAR=1 in the environment's variables, Highball 0.10.26): the sidecar attached to falloutwHR.exe (its line is in the log). The opening logo now starts at normal speed but still slows to a crawl if left to run. Clicking past it reaches the title menu, character creation and the game, which crawls again at the Overseer's talking head. The same in DXMT and WineD3D mode. In both logs DDRAW.dll from the game's folder loads as builtin, right after wined3d, so Wine's own ddraw ran, not cnc-ddraw (no ddraw override in that run's DLL overrides), and the GOG copy's high resolution patch (f1_res.dll) loads d3d9 and d3dx9_31, so the game drew through Direct3D 9, which goes through WineD3D in both modes. udance4ever again on highball-db#862 (2026-11-07), the Wine 11 engine r30 with athei's x87sidecar on (it attached to the game in the log), DXVK: the same as the other modes. The opening logo starts at full speed and then crawls, the Metal HUD's frame interval stepping up to about 53 ms (19 fps). DXVK also draws the picture zoomed in, and only WineD3D mode gets the resolution right. The Overseer's voice is garbled while his talking head crawls. Fallout Community Edition (fallout1-ce), a native Mac app, runs the reporter's copy. udance4ever again on highball-db#862 (2026-11-07T18:49Z), r30, WineD3D, the sidecar on: with dsound=d in the environment's DLL overrides no game window showed. The log shows FalloutLauncher.exe, a .NET launcher in C:\Games\Fallout, loading and then never starting falloutwHR.exe before the run was stopped after 49 seconds, so the game itself didn't get to run without sound. With dsound set to Disabled in winecfg instead, the game started with sound, but that override was on FalloutLauncher.exe's own page in winecfg, so falloutwHR.exe still loaded Wine's DSOUND.DLL (log). The sound test is still to be done. udance4ever again on highball-db#862 (2026-11-08): the winecfg used before was pinned in the Games environment, so its overrides went to Games. With dsound set to Disabled for falloutwHR.exe in the Wine 11 environment's own winecfg, the game starts (r30, WineD3D, the sidecar attached), loads its DirectDraw, Direct3D 9, f1_res.dll and DirectInput, then stops where DirectSound would load and never opens a window, the same as with dsound=d for the whole environment (log). So the game needs DirectSound to go on, and this test can't tell whether the sound path causes the crawl. The reporter plays Fallout Community Edition instead.
Before installing anything, it is worth checking whether the game already ships a native Mac build.
Common questions
Does Fallout work on Mac?
Fallout has no native Mac build, but it is reported to run on Apple Silicon through Highball, a free open-source compatibility layer. This comes from community reports rather than a Highball test run, so treat it as a reasonable expectation rather than a guarantee.
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This page is generated from an open database. If you have run Fallout on Apple Silicon, working or not, a report takes a minute and fills in the empty rows above. Send a report, or read how the data is put together.