Game On? Despite a growing userbase and popularity, macOS still poses significant challenges for true gamers. While alternative solutions exist to ease the burden, Whisky was one of the better compatibility layers that is now about to go dark – because its developer has simply lost interest.
The developer of Whisky recently announced that the project will no longer be actively maintained. Also known as WhiskyWine, Whisky is a user-friendly frontend designed to run Wine's compatibility layer on macOS.
Like Wine, Whisky is open source, but it also incorporates code from CodeWeavers CrossOver – a commercial product aimed at enhancing Wine's functionality by offering additional fixes and improved compatibility for running Windows games on Mac systems. CodeWeavers has contributed over 50,000 changes to Wine, making it a major force in the project's ongoing development.
Whisky will not receive any future releases, except possibly for occasional updates if a macOS upgrade breaks the application. The developer explained that he lost interest in the project, which is time-consuming and provides little financial reward – especially for someone still in school.
Additionally, the developer feels that Whisky hasn't offered any meaningful contributions to the broader Wine community. Since Whisky is based on CrossOver and doesn't introduce new improvements of its own, it ultimately falls short.
In fact, the developer described Whisky as having a "parasitic relationship" with CrossOver – potentially harming its profitability. "Without CrossOver, there would be no Wine on Mac," the programmer stated.
CodeWeavers continues to invest significant time and resources into transforming macOS into a viable gaming platform. CrossOver now includes tools to support the latest DirectX 12 games on Apple's OS – so much so that Apple even used its open-source code as a foundation for the company's own Game Porting Toolkit.
Meanwhile, Whisky has simply brought select features from CrossOver and Apple's toolkit to users under a fully open-source license.
Whisky was a major undertaking for a solo developer, which made the decision to stop active development a difficult one. The programmer is now focused on other projects, including a macOS port of Sonic Unleashed Recompiled, built using Apple's Metal API. Recompiling old console games is an exciting frontier for retro gaming enthusiasts, though it's unlikely to replace emulation or virtualization due to the immense effort required to bring each title back to life on modern PCs.
