Games

Games

Titles we have deliberately taken on, and what was measured on each. This is not an inventory of anyone's library — a game gets a row when there was a reason to work on it.

Tested on an M4 Max, macOS 27, GPTK 4.0b2, against CrossOver 26.3 and crossover-preview-arm64-20260821. The CrossOver column says which builds each title was measured on. No bottle carried winevideo except where a page below says otherwise.

Game	Engine	Symptom	Fix	Backend	DX	GPTK	CrossOver	Status
Mortal Shell 2	Unreal Engine 5.6.1	Crash on the first cutscene	Runtime patch, 4 sites	D3DMetal	12	3.0 and 4.0b2	26.3 and Preview	Fixed
Life is Strange: Reunion	Unreal Engine 5	Freezes after a while, anywhere	DXGI node guard	D3DMetal	12	4.0b2 only -- 3.0 crashes it	Preview -- 26.3 crashes	Fixed
Life is Strange: Double Exposure	Unreal Engine 5	Freezes after a while, anywhere	DXGI node guard, same DLL	D3DMetal	12	4.0b2 only -- 3.0 crashes it	Preview -- 26.3 crashes	Fixed
DYNASTY WARRIORS: ORIGINS	Koei Tecmo, in-house	Cutscene runs with sound, picture black	Video bridge, D3D11 to D3D12	D3DMetal	12	4.0b2	Preview -- crashes on 26.3	Fixed
Beast of Reincarnation	Unreal Engine 5	Startup video plays with sound, no picture	NV12 restored, Electra forced to software	D3DMetal	12	3.0 and 4.0b2	26.3 and Preview	Fixed
Persona 5 Strikers	Koei Tecmo, in-house	Video never starts; sound only	Staged VC-1 codec, and a D3D9 to D3D11 bridge	DXMT	11	3.0 and 4.0b2	26.3 and Preview	Fixed
Nioh	Koei Tecmo, in-house	Cutscene refuses to play, then crashes	Staged WMV3 codec, and the same D3D9 to D3D11 bridge	DXMT	11	4.0b2	Preview -- not tried on 26.3	Fixed
Nioh 2	Koei Tecmo, in-house	Cutscene refuses to play, then crashes	Same codec and same bridge as Nioh, unchanged	DXMT	11	4.0b2	Preview -- not tried on 26.3	Fixed
Nioh 3	Koei Tecmo, in-house	Failed to play movie	The DYNASTY WARRIORS bridge, unchanged	D3DMetal	12	4.0b2	Preview -- not tried on 26.3	Fixed
Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty	Koei Tecmo, in-house	Cutscene runs with sound, picture black	The DYNASTY WARRIORS bridge, unchanged	D3DMetal	12	4.0b2	Preview -- not tried on 26.3	Fixed
NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139	Toylogic, in-house	Crashes when the first video starts	Software decode, and the frame written into the game's target	D3DMetal	11	4.0b2	Preview -- not tried on 26.3	Fixed
KINGDOM HEARTS Dream Drop Distance	Square Enix, in-house	Cutscene runs with sound, picture solid green	Software decode, and the luma and chroma planes written into the game's own textures	D3DMetal	11 + 12	4.0b2	Preview -- not tried on 26.3	Fixed
KINGDOM HEARTS HD 1.5+2.5 ReMIX	Square Enix, in-house	Cutscene runs with sound, picture solid green	The Dream Drop Distance fix, unchanged -- six executables, same route	D3DMetal	11 + 12	4.0b2	Preview -- not tried on 26.3	Fixed
TMNT: Splintered Fate	Rebirth, in-house	Opens a window, then closes silently	A guard on the D3D12 call that ends the process instead of failing	D3DMetal	12	4.0b2	Preview -- not tried on 26.3	Fixed
Tormented Souls 2	Unreal Engine 5	Fatal error before the first frame	16:9 modes added to a list that offered none	D3DMetal	12	4.0b2	Preview -- not tried on 26.3	Fixed
Devil May Cry 5	RE Engine	Crashes when a skill preview video plays	Staged VC-1 codec. Nothing installed beside the game	D3DMetal	12	3.0 and 4.0b2	26.3 and Preview	Fixed
RESIDENT EVIL 2	RE Engine	Crashes when a video plays	The same staged VC-1 codec, unchanged	D3DMetal	12	3.0 and 4.0b2	26.3 and Preview	Fixed
RESIDENT EVIL 3	RE Engine	Crashes when a video plays	The same staged VC-1 codec, unchanged	D3DMetal	12	3.0 and 4.0b2	26.3 and Preview	Fixed
NINJA GAIDEN 4	Koei Tecmo, in-house	Says the VP9 codec is missing, then exits	Staged Matroska demuxer, and the MFT gate answered	D3DMetal	12	3.0 only -- 4.0b2 stalls it	26.3 only -- Preview stalls before video	Fixed

The GPTK column is the one that decides, and it is newer than this table. Apple's Game Porting Toolkit is what actually draws these games, and CrossOver ships it inside the bundle rather than as something you pick: 26.3 carries D3DMetal 3.0, Preview 27.0 carries 4.0b2 and uses it unless CX_GRAPHICS_BACKEND_VERSION says otherwise. So "this only works on Preview" has, for at least two titles here, meant "this needs the newer toolkit" and nothing about Wine at all.

The two rows in bold are where that stops being a footnote. NINJA GAIDEN 4 runs on 3.0 and stalls on 4.0b2. Life is Strange runs on 4.0b2 and crashes on 3.0. Opposite requirements, same machine, so there is no single toolkit that serves the whole table and no version of CrossOver that is simply "better". Both were measured by moving the toolkit under a fixed CrossOver, which is the only way to separate the two.

Everything else in the column is derived rather than freshly run: a title measured on 26.3 was measured on 3.0, and one measured on Preview was measured on 4.0b2. A cell naming one generation means the other was never tried, not that it fails.

Backend and DX are not preferences, they are requirements. Persona 5 Strikers, Nioh and Nioh 2 only work on DXMT: all three need a shared D3D9 surface handle, and DXMT implements sharing where D3DMetal has none to build on. Nioh 3, despite the name, belongs with the other group -- it is D3D12 on D3DMetal and never touches D3D9, and NieR Replicant is D3D11 on D3DMetal. The other nine run on D3DMetal with the D3D12 renderer, which is also what keeps PSO precompilation -- -dx11 dodges some of these faults and costs permanent shader-compilation stutter.

Which CrossOver, and what "Preview" means. Every measurement here was taken against CrossOver 26.3 and crossover-preview-arm64-20260821, and the CrossOver column says which of the two a title was measured on rather than which it might work on. Everything runs on that Preview. Three are confirmed on 26.3 as well. This project targets that Preview build, and it is what every title is measured and supported on. Three also run on stable 26.3 and the column says so, but as a bonus rather than a promise -- stable is not what gets tested before a release.

What stops the other three is in the engine. Both Life is Strange titles freeze on 26.3 with the fix removed exactly as they do with it, so nothing installed beside the game is involved; what differs is D3DMetal, 3.0 against 4.0b2. And DYNASTY WARRIORS needs a WebM demuxer that 26.3 has no way to reach -- staging the plugin was tried and the video still never starts. Persona 5 Strikers plays on both, which is what its fix predicted: it stages its own decoder, so what CrossOver ships stops mattering. A first attempt on 26.3 failed and was recorded as the title not working there -- wrongly. The staged codec is built against one CrossOver and is not usable under another, and none had been built for 26.3 yet. DYNASTY WARRIORS crashes there too; that much was run, while the reason given for it is read from the two installs' plugin sets rather than from watching it fail.

Four rows record an absence rather than a result: the three Nioh titles and NieR Replicant were fixed on Preview and none was launched on 26.3, so nothing is claimed either way. Their codec is staged the same way Strikers' is, which is the half that made Strikers portable, but the bridge half has only ever run against the Preview build's DXMT.

None of these games needs CrossOver patched, wherever the container can be opened. That was not true when this project started, and it is the single biggest thing that changed. The qualifier is the whole of what remains, and it is a container question rather than a codec one.

Both builds decode VP9 the same way, and for a long time what only Preview could do was open a WebM -- which was the whole of the difference. DYNASTY WARRIORS ships 355 .webm cutscenes and could not get as far as decoding on stable, while Mortal Shell 2 ships the same codec in .mp4, which both builds handle. The plugin-by-plugin comparison that conclusion rested on is in Findings, under The container, not the codec.

That gap is now closed, and it was a missing plugin rather than a missing engine. Neither build ships a Matroska demuxer; Preview reached WebM by another route. Staging libgstmatroska beside the decoder gives stable one too, and NINJA GAIDEN 4 is where it was measured -- it plays on stock 26.3, video and all, with nothing patched into CrossOver. What this means for the titles above has not been re-measured: their rows still say what each was measured on, and DYNASTY WARRIORS in particular deserves a fresh run on 26.3 before its row changes.

Three titles need a codec no CrossOver ships -- VC-1 for Persona 5 Strikers, WMV3 for Nioh and Nioh 2 -- and it is staged beside the game rather than patched into it. Nioh 3 needs none: its video is already NV12 by the time Media Foundation is asked for it.

None of these fixes decodes anything. The frames existed all along; they were being crashed on, mislabelled, or thrown away.

Every row is a title we deliberately took on, and every claim on the linked page comes from a measurement on an installed copy.

One bottle cannot hold all of these

CX_GRAPHICS_BACKEND divides them. Five run on d3dmetal; Persona 5 Strikers runs only on dxmt, because it needs a shared D3D9 surface handle and D3DMetal has none to give.

Steam libraries are shared between bottles, so giving that one a bottle of its own costs no disk and no re-download. Switching the backend by hand also works and means remembering to switch it — and a forgotten backend looks exactly like a fix that stopped working.

What each fix needs from CrossOver

The older form of this question was "does a fix need winevideo?", which framed it as a codec problem. It is not one, and asking it that way produced the wrong answer for the single title it existed to describe. What separates these six is what each fix needs CrossOver to have already done before it can start: open a container, decode a codec, or neither.

• DYNASTY WARRIORS: ORIGINS — a WebM demuxer. Its 355 cutscenes are .webm, and the bridge only presents frames that Media Foundation has already produced. Preview ships the matroska plugin and stable 26.3 does not, so on stable MFCreateSourceReaderFromByteStream fails at the open and nothing reaches a decoder at all. Both builds decode the VP9 inside a WebM identically, through applemedia and VideoToolbox. The evidence and its limits are on that title's page.
• Persona 5 Strikers — a VC-1 decoder, which it brings with it. No CrossOver ships one. It is staged beside the game rather than patched into the engine, so this fix depends on nothing CrossOver decodes.
• Everything else — nothing. Mortal Shell 2 decodes in-process with Electra's own libvpx; Beast of Reincarnation goes through an H.264 decoder both builds have; both Life is Strange freezes are inside DXGI and never touch video. One qualification on the last of those: the DLL those two install carries all three repairs, and its policy table arms only the node guard for them — but the Media Foundation hooks it installs go in for every title regardless, and that unconditional instrumentation is the standing suspicion for why those two crash on 26.3. The fault has nothing to do with video; the DLL touches video anyway.

On winevideo. On a current Preview none of these fixes needs it, and the VP9 and WebM plugins it installs are redundant there. On a stable build it ships a WebM demuxer, which is the thing DYNASTY WARRIORS has no other way to get — stable 26.3 carries no matroska plugin, read out of the two installs. That is a conclusion from what each build contains, not a measurement: the title has never been launched on stable, with winevideo or without it, so no dependency on it has been measured here. One unbuilt alternative, and the reasoning behind it, is in Findings, under The container, not the codec.

The mechanism these six share

Why each hook exists, which vtable slot each one takes, how a carrier DLL is picked and what was tried and did not work is in Findings. The division is deliberate: these pages carry the per-title findings and the wrong turns that came first, that one carries what is common to all of them.

Adding a row

Run the survey on that game's folder, and if it misbehaves, the probe. Both are in diagnostics/ and both are described in Diagnosing a new game.

Paste what they print, and say which CrossOver build printed it. Measurements are the point of these pages, and a row without one is worse than no row.