MacRunner 1.0.5 — development preview

MacRunner 1.0.5 — development preview. A native Mac app for running Windows games and apps on Apple Silicon: Wine for Windows APIs, HyperBridge for x86-64/x86 → ARM64 CPU translation, DXMT and Metal for Direct3D 10/11 graphics.

What changed since 1.0.4

Three compatibility fixes. All three were found on Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, but they concern any program that makes the same checks:

• Games now see SSE4.2, AES, PCLMULQDQ and SHA. The CPU translator took these features from ARM64 ID registers that Wine publishes without their crypto fields. Games therefore saw SSE4.2 as missing, although every Apple Silicon Mac executes these instructions. Many games from 2020 on check for SSE4.2 and quit. The engine now sets the translator's own option FEX_HOSTFEATURES=enablecrypto in ENGINE.json. The translator binary is unchanged.
• An L3 cache is reported on Apple Silicon. macOS does not expose one, so Windows programs saw zero L3 caches. Indiana Jones divides by that number and crashed with an integer division by zero. ntdll.so now reports one L3 cache, shared by all processors and sized like the performance cluster's L2 (12 MB on an M1 Pro).
• Programs with a shared, writable section that is not aligned to the Mac's 16 KB memory page now load. Wine refused such programs with "Bad EXE format" (c000007b); Indiana Jones's executable has such a section. The section is now loaded as a private copy. One limitation: unlike on Windows, it is then not shared between processes.
• Nothing else changed. HyperBridge engine 0015, the rest of Wine, DXMT and the bundled libraries are the files of 1.0.4. The engine manifest ENGINE.json lists every file with its SHA-256.

Checked on this build

MacBook Pro M1 Pro, macOS 27.0, with the engine files unpacked from this release's ZIP. Where the 1.0.4 column is filled, the same check was run on 1.0.4; ABZU and Divinity were checked on 1.0.5 only.

	1.0.4	1.0.5
x86-64 test program: CPUID SSE4.2 / AES / PCLMULQDQ / SHA	0 / 0 / 0 / 0 (instructions refused)	1 / 1 / 1 / 1 (instructions execute)
known-answer tests: CRC32C, PCLMULQDQ, AES-128 (FIPS-197), SHA-256 (sha256rnds2), VAES, VPCLMULQDQ	not advertised	12 of 12 correct
GetLogicalProcessorInformation: L3 caches	0	1 (12 MB, shared by 8 processors)
test program with a shared writable section at a 4 KB (not 16 KB) boundary	"Bad EXE format"	starts; a second process gets its own copy of the section
Hollow Knight 1.5.12620 (Unity 6): main menu	41.0 s, 39.4 s (2 runs, 29.09)	40.0 s, 37.5 s (2 runs) — within run-to-run variation
ABZU	—	main menu
Divinity: Original Sin — Enhanced Edition	—	main menu (profile dialog)
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (GOG)	"Bad EXE format" at start	loads; the game detects SSE4.2 and the L3 cache and stops at its own message "Missing Vulkan instance extension(s) … Hardware ray tracing is required"
Stardew Valley 1.6	stops while loading its .NET assemblies, before opening a window	opens its window, which stays white; the game waits — no menu in either version
Hedon Bloodrite	"Very Fatal Error" (access violation reading address 0) during start	the same error at the same address

Stardew Valley and Hedon were checked with the same automated launcher on both versions. The launcher does not apply the app's per-game launch profiles, so these two rows compare 1.0.4 and 1.0.5 with each other; they do not replace the tested-games list.

Indiana Jones does not run yet. It requires Vulkan with hardware ray tracing, and this bundle contains no Vulkan driver. 1.0.5 removes the three earlier blocks on the way there. FPS was not measured for this release. The other titles in the tested-games list have not been re-checked.

Requirements and first launch

• Apple Silicon Mac, macOS 27.0 (the bundled media libraries need it).
• The app is signed ad hoc and not notarized (Apple Developer account approval is pending). After unzipping, move MacRunner.app to Applications. If macOS refuses to open it, do one of the following once: Control-click the app in Finder and choose Open; allow it in System Settings → Privacy & Security; or remove the download quarantine in Terminal with xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/MacRunner.app.
• Automatic updates are off in this preview.

Scope

Windows x64 games using Direct3D 10/11 are the main target. The DirectX 12 development path and a Vulkan driver are not included in this bundle. 32-bit Windows support is limited, and Windows ARM64 applications are not validated. A listed launch profile is not a compatibility guarantee. Release status →

Source code and licenses

• HyperBridge: t0b1kent/hyperbridge (MIT; FEX-Emu with MacRunner's modifications).
• Wine (LGPL-2.1-or-later), DXMT (LGPL-2.1-or-later), both with MacRunner's changes, and the other bundled LGPL/GPL components: the corresponding source is attached to this release as MacRunner-1.0.5-sources.tar, and MacRunner-1.0.5-sources-README.md describes it. The two Wine changes of 1.0.5 are in wine/ntdll-1.0.5/ of that package, together with their build recipe and a function-by-function comparison with the 1.0.4 ntdll.so.
• License texts of the bundled components are inside the app (Contents/Resources/engine/licenses) and in the source package.

Checksums of every file of this release are in SHA256SUMS.