Experimenting with running Skyrim on my MacBook Pro

As I’ve mentioned many times in posts on this blog, as well as in the FAQ page, I am not a PC gamer. My primary computer is an M1 MacBook Pro, which has meant that up until now, to run Skyrim on it, I’ve had to do so via a Windows 11 VM in Parallels.

This has been unsatisfactory to me for some time. Mainly because Parallels wants to charge me a subscription fee in order to make it actually use enough of my system memory to mod Skyrim effectively… and that’s bullshit. But recent events with Big Tech trying to slather AI slop all over everything, whether we all want it or not, have made me increasingly disenchanted with keeping Windows in any form around. I blew it away completely off my old potato laptop.

And now I’m considering my options for whether I can ditch the VM off my MacBook entirely.

But in order to do that, I need an alternate way to run Skyrim on it. I do enjoy playing Skyrim on my Deck immensely, let there be no doubt about that. But there’s a lot to be said for having a laptop-sized screen to play on. And it’d be nice to actually try to utilize more of my MacBook’s actual processing power.

So I’ve started looking into methods that let you run Windows programs directly on Macs, without having to go to the trouble of setting up an entire Windows VM to do it. There are three I’m currently aware of:

Wine is the compatibility layer that allows Windows programs to run on Linux distros–and also, macOS. It’s the thing that lets Proton work on the Steam Deck. And since I’ve had good experiences getting stuff to work on the Deck, I’m really interested in trying it on the Mac, too.

Crossover and Whisky both essentially do the same thing: they’re wrappers for Wine and bring in nicer UI to let you interact with it. If you’re the hands-on tinkering type, you might be fine with Wine directly. But if you want less fuss than that to get Skyrim working on your Mac, one of the two clients might be a better match for you. The main difference between Crossover and Whisky, at a casual glance, is that Whisky is free, and Crossover is not (although you can download a trial version to play with for 14 days if you want to check it out).

I’ve now experimented with both of these apps to see how they stack up for letting me just do a straight install of Steam and Skyrim.

Whisky

I tried this one first, since it does have the advantage of being free. And while it was super easy to install, it choked hard on installing the current version of the Steam client. Something about the current Steam version is not playing nicely with Whisky at all.

This is apparently a known issue. I found discussion of it on Reddit threads, as well as the app’s own docs, with quotes from relevant users on Whisky’s Discord. And there are provided workaround steps to let you pull down the previous version of the Steam client, which I can confirm did work.

But this is overall a suboptimal situation. Particularly given, as I understand it, the most recent Steam client had security updates.

And here’s the bigger issue I see with Whisky right now: I found mentions that its main dev was stepping back from maintaining the project. I’ve also seen signs that another member of the Whisky community may step up to take over, but that this may not be able to happen until this summer.

So right now, there’s a question mark over this app. It seems pretty cool, but that it’s not currently being actively maintained seems like a blocker to me. Your mileage may vary, particularly if Whisky being free is enticing to you, and if you have the technical chops necessary to work through any curveballs it throws you.

Also, once I got Skyrim running on it, I had issues with sound. I was able to do the opening sequence in Helgen, but NPC dialogue kept cutting in and out on me. Unless I was looking directly at an NPC when they spoke, any line they uttered got really soft, almost inaudible. This too was apparently a known issue, but the ways to fix it seemed fiddly, and I wasn’t quite patient enough to pursue them, given the other issues I noted.

Crossover

Meanwhile, there’s also Crossover. I’d actually heard of Crossover before, and by “before” I mean, dating way back to when I first made a MacBook my primary computer. It’s been around a while.

I had not, however, ever done more than just casually glance at it, and that was long enough ago that I had no current impressions of it. So I downloaded its trial version today, just to play with it, and see whether it did better at Whisky with installing Steam and Skyrim.

Answer: yes, it does. It had no issues whatsoever downloading the current Steam client, and also no issues installing Skyrim itself. And since I play with a controller if I’m on my computer, I plugged in my Nintendo Switch Pro controller to see if that’d work. It did.

The one minor hiccup I ran into was a question of sound quality. Once I installed Skyrim and launched the test game I’d started via Whisky (which had synced to the Steam Cloud, so I still had access to the same save file), the sound was a little crackly.

Once again, this was also a known issue. But this time, the recommended fix for this was very easy: getting into the Utilities directory in my MacOS Applications, finding the Audio MIDI Setup app, and changing the “Format” setting to 96,000 Hz. This fixed the crackling problem.

Running Wine directly on MacOS

I can confirm that Wine is easily installable via Homebrew. I haven’t actually done the same testing with it yet that I did with Crossover and Whisky, though. I’d prefer to use one of the wrappers, just because the UI is nicer. But if working with Wine more directly will do the job, I’m fine with that. I’ll do another post to follow up, once I’ve finished experimenting.

Modding Skyrim

So at this point, what I know is, Crossover is a viable option if you want to just play Skyrim without any changes to it. For a lot of players, this should be more than enough.

But if you actually want to mod Skyrim, then the situation gets more complex. Because from what I’ve seen so far researching the matter, several of the standard tools for modding Skyrim present challenges.

Vortex

My initial attempt to install the most recent version of Vortex was not successful. I was able to run the installer. The program tried to launch, but it didn’t show me an actual window I could use to do anything.

This appears to be consistent with Crossover’s own findings on the situation, as reported on Crossover’s page for user reports on how well Vortex works with it.

Wabbajack

Wabbajack will install and launch, but it has issues with its settings for logging into Nexus. The blocker for me as of this writing appears to be getting it to correctly use Webview.

Crossover’s Wabbajack ratings page seems to think Wabbajack works just fine on it. Given that I can’t get it to log into Nexus, though, this seems to be at least somewhat mistaken. But I don’t know if the problem is that whoever tested it didn’t get to the point of logging into Nexus, or, if there are other steps to follow to get it working that I’m not aware of yet.

For now, though, this is blocking me from installing a Wabbajack-based modpack like Tuxborn. I’ll see if I can find out more about making this feasible.

(I did find someone’s Reddit post in which they talked about running Wabbajack in a Windows VM and running the actual modded Skyrim via Crossover. I could do that; I already know from experimenting with Tuxborn that Wabbajack runs just fine on my VM. But the entire point of this exercise is to ditch the VM if at all possible. Not just ditch it partially.)

Mod Organizer 2

MO2 did in fact install in my Crossover test! Just be sure to launch Skyrim first before you try to run MO2, so that it’ll properly detect Skyrim being installed in the bottle as well. It was even able to log into Nexus and launch an authorization page via my main Mac browser.

So, if you want to use MO2 for your modding needs, from what I can see so far, this appears to be the most viable option.

WyreBash

I’ve found multiple Reddit posts that talk about WyreBash working all right to mod Skyrim. I have yet to use WyreBash myself on any platform, so I can’t testify as to the truth of this.

Installing mods manually

If you’re really hardcore about it, you can always install mods manually. But seriously, why would you give yourself that headache? Do it with a mod manager if at all possible! If nothing else, just to manage the inevitable mod conflicts.

Comments? Questions?

If anybody out there has successfully gotten a modded Skyrim working on MacOS, I’d love to hear from you. Drop me a line here or on Mastodon if you have useful info to share!