A Tale of Two Steams (Tragic)

[ehowton]

So...I'm not much of a macOS guy. I mostly use its unix shell, though I'm beginning to understand that it may behave more like Windows where dynamically linked binaries are concerned, despite appearing statically contained within its own executable environment (Applications).

So check it, Baldur's Gate 3 (BG3) is released as a Mac binary. Only it's not. It actually uses macOS's built-in Rosetta as its emulator. Fair enough. But I play Cyberpunk 2077 (CP77) which was not released as a Mac binary. No worries, the company Codeweavers wrote a neat little front-end GUI to wine called Crossover which utilizes brew (or so I assume based on their naming conventions) to run x86 apps on macOS. Now, whether Crossover replaces Rosetta (less likely) or simply leverages Rosetta (more likely given it already exists) is, at this point immaterial. I installed Steam into a discrete Crossover instance, then installed CP77 via Steam into the same instance. It plays flawlessly on an M3 Max MacBook Pro.

Much later I decide to install and play BG3. Because the x86 version of BG3 is not compatible with Crossover, I cannot install it into a Steam instance via Crossover. I thought (foolishly), "No problem! I'll use the native Mac client!" So I download Steam for Mac, and install BG3 for Mac. Again, it plays flawlessly.

Here's the tricky part: Awkwardly, now Crossover Steam calls macOS steam. Crossover Steam shows only CP77 installed, and macOS Steam shows only BG3 installed, but I cannot launch CP77 unless I uninstall macOS Steam. THANKFULLY the BG3 binaries are on an external (the same external as my Crossover app and games) so hopefully all I will have to do if I ever want to play BG3 again is to install macOS Steam, knowing I will be unable to play CP77 until it is uninstalled.

Comments

[ubet_cha]

Excellent post!! BG3 is on my wishlist for later this year, as you know my OS at home is kubuntu and I generally play on steam. Looks like I'll wait a bit. I want to upgrade kaladin first.

[ehowton]

AFAIK BG3 will run under Steam on kubunutu as it is x86 native :)

The issue seemed to stem solely from the way the m-series' aarch architecture is translated and how macOS handles binaries *shrug*