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
Does not start on the Rosetta engines: its anti-tamper relies on hardware debug registers, which Rosetta does not provide, and then loops without a window until it exits. D3DMetal is never reached. Highball's native arm64 preview engine implements x86 debug registers in FEX and Wine, untested with this game.
Known issues
No window; the game runs at 100% CPU for one to six minutes and exits with c0000409
What helps none on the Rosetta engines. Untested: the arm64 preview engine, which implements debug registers
Why the anti-tamper sets hardware debug registers, which Rosetta cannot provide (Wine fakes success), and then faults on the same instruction in a loop (highball-db#537)
Provenance
Reported by jazzyblu (highball-db#537, 2026-10-18), Apple M2 Max, macOS 27.0.1, Highball 0.10.15, engine x64-sikarugir10.0_6-r26, D3DMetal, AVX advertised and not, rated 1 of 5 (does not launch), with a WINEDEBUG=+seh analysis: the executable's anti-tamper raises a few hundred deliberate exceptions, which pass, then sets hardware debug registers with NtSetContextThread (Wine logs 'Setting debug registers is not supported under Rosetta, faking success'), after which the main thread faults on the same address over and over (13,000 times in 7 minutes) at 100% CPU until it exits with c0000409. The same game under FEX (Proton ARM64) stops earlier at the self-modifying code stage. Also highball#383 (M2 Pro). Not verified by the maintainer.
Before installing anything, it is worth checking whether the game already ships a native Mac build.
Common questions
Does Planet Zoo 2 work on Mac?
Planet Zoo 2 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.
Contribute a result
This page is generated from an open database. If you have run Planet Zoo 2 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.