Darwine For Mac

The Darwine project aims at offering users the possibility to run software developed for the Windows operating system on their Mac, without having to use a virtual machine. To make this possible, Darwine includes a port of the Wine app, and other supporting tools.

Darwine comes with its own installer package which greatly simplifies the whole procedure: simply follow the on screen instructions, and provide the password for your computer’s admin account when prompted.

The main goal of the Darwine project was to provide a port for Wine on macOS, which could be used on both PPC and Intel x86 architectures. However, the PPC support is no longer developed, and the project has merged back into the WineHQ codebase.

Darwine  integrates the QEMU processor-emulator in order to provide a Wine version that is able to run Windows executable files on PowerPC Macs.

This was necessary because older PPCs cannot run code built for x86 processors (AMD or Intel). Later on, the Darwine project has merged back to the Wine tree because Apple has moved all the new macOS releases to the x86 platform.

However, Wine has been successfully ported for PowerPC, by using XQuartz. Darwine also provides support for using WineLib on macOS, which means that Windows apps can be recompiled using this library in order to become available on Mac computers.

The Darwine project is no longer developed separately from the Wine emulator, but you can still use it to effortlessly deploy Wine on your Mac, and to be able to run x86 Windows apps on older PPC Macs.