Boot Camp Windows Emulator Mac
Use your current Mac computer to develop apps for Windows.
Run Windows on your Mac and use Visual Studio
Jul 13, 2019 Running Windows on a Mac, and Connecting it to Mac. Most recently the following options are available for running Windows on the Mac:Apple Boot Camp support website and user to user. G3 - Windows 95 or Windows 98, with 256 MB of RAM assigned to emulator and 2 GB assigned to swap file.G4 - Windows 2000 or Windows ME, with 512 MB of RAM. Oct 29, 2019 In the end, programs like the ones listed above aren't the most reliable way to play Windows games on your Mac, but they do give you an option. Of course, another option is to run Windows on your Mac, via BootCamp or a virtual machine, which takes a little know-how and a lot of memory space on your Mac's hard drive.
Are you ready to start developing Universal Windows apps, but you don't have a PC handy? That's okay — you can use your Mac! With popular third-party solutions like Apple Boot Camp, Oracle VirtualBox, VMware Fusion, and Parallels Desktop, you can install Windows 10 and Microsoft Visual Studio on your Apple computer.
Note You will need a Windows 10 bootable image on disk or USB flash drive. If you are a MSDN Subscriber, you can download the install image from the MSDN Subscriber Downloads center. If you aren't a subscriber, the installer can be purchased from the Microsoft Store. You can also download it from this location, which is useful if you are already running Windows and wish to upgrade.
Once you have Windows running, you can then install the latest release of Visual Studio from Developer downloads for Windows 10 and start writing apps!
Note If you plan to use the Visual Studio device emulators, you must install a 64-bit (x64) version of Windows 10 Pro or better. Unfortunately, some older Macs cannot run 64-bit Windows. Please check with Apple if your hardware is compatible on thisApple support page.
Apple Boot Camp
The Boot Camp Assistant app is pre-installed on every recent Mac, and launching it will walk you through the process of installing Windows 10. All you need is a copy of Windows (from the sources listed above) and at least 30 Gb of free disk space. Once installed, you can choose to boot into Mac OSX or Windows 10. For more info, see Apple's Boot Camp instructions page.
Parallels Desktop
Using Parallels Desktop 11, you can run Windows apps side-by-side with existing Mac applications, including Visual Studio and Cortana. A pro version is available that includes extra features for developers, including improved debugging, and support for Docker and Jenkins. For more info, and a free trial version, see Parallels Desktop.
VMWare Fusion
Fusion 8 from VMWare will let you run Visual Studio right on your Mac desktop. A pro version is available to offer developers some more advanced features such as vSphere support. For more info, and a free trial version, see VMware Fusion.
Oracle VirtualBox
VirtualBox is a free application for running virtual machines on your computer, and it supports running Windows on Mac. It is a no-frills option, but the price is appealing. For more info, see VirtualBox.
The Mac has plenty of games, but it'll always get the short end of the stick compared to Windows. If you want to play the latest games on your Mac, you have no choice but to install Windows .. or do you?
There are a few ways you can play Windows games on your Mac without having to dedicate a partition to Boot Camp or giving away vast amounts of hard drive space to a virtual machine app like VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop. Here are a few other options for playing Windows games on your Mac without the hassle or expense of having to install Windows.
GeForce Now
PC gaming on Mac? Yes you can, thanks to Nvidia's GeForce Now. The service allows users to play PC games from Steam or Battle.net on macOS devices. Better still, the graphic power of these games resides on Nvidia's servers. The biggest drawback: the service remains in beta, and there's been no announcement when the first full release is coming or what a monthly subscription will cost.
For now, at least, the service is free to try and enjoy. All supported GeForce NOW titles work on Macs, and yes, there are plenty of them already available!
The Wine Project
The Mac isn't the only computer whose users have wanted to run software designed for Windows. More than 20 years ago, a project was started to enable Windows software to work on POSIX-compliant operating systems like Linux. It's called The Wine Project, and the effort continues to this day. OS X is POSIX-compliant, too (it's Unix underneath all of Apple's gleam, after all), so Wine will run on the Mac also.
Wine is a recursive acronym that stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator. It's been around the Unix world for a very long time, and because OS X is a Unix-based operating system, it works on the Mac too.
As the name suggests, Wine isn't an emulator. The easiest way to think about it is as a compatibility layer that translates Windows Application Programming Interface (API) calls into something that the Mac can understand. So when a game says 'draw a square on the screen,' the Mac does what it's told.
You can use straight-up Wine if you're technically minded. It isn't for the faint of heart, although there are instructions online, and some kind souls have set up tutorials, which you can find using Google. Wine doesn't work with all games, so your best bet is for you to start searching for which games you'd like to play and whether anyone has instructions to get it working on the Mac using Wine.
Note: At the time of this writing, The Wine Project does not support macOS 10.15 Catalina.
CrossOver Mac
CodeWeavers took some of the sting out of Wine by making a Wine-derived app called CrossOver Mac. CrossOver Mac is Wine with specialized Mac support. Like Wine, it's a Windows compatibility layer for the Mac that enables some games to run.
CodeWeavers has modified the source code to Wine, made some improvements to configuration to make it easier, and provided support for their product, so you shouldn't be out in the cold if you have trouble getting things to run.
My experience with CrossOver — like Wine — is somewhat hit or miss. Its list of actual supported games is pretty small. Many other unsupported games do, in fact work — the CrossOver community has many notes about what to do or how to get them to work, which are referenced by the installation program. Still, if you're more comfortable with an app that's supported by a company, CrossOver may be worth a try. What's more, a free trial is available for download, so you won't be on the hook to pay anything to give it a shot.
Boxer
If you're an old-school gamer and have a hankering to play DOS-based PC games on your Mac, you may have good luck with Boxer. Boxer is a straight-up emulator designed especially for the Mac, which makes it possible to run DOS games without having to do any configuring, installing extra software, or messing around in the Mac Terminal app.
With Boxer, you can drag and drop CD-ROMs (or disk images) from the DOS games you'd like to play. It also wraps them into self-contained 'game boxes' to make them easy to play in the future and gives you a clean interface to find the games you have installed.
Boxer is built using DOSBox, a DOS emulation project that gets a lot of use over at GOG.com, a commercial game download service that houses hundreds of older PC games that work with the Mac. So if you've ever downloaded a GOG.com game that works using DOSBox, you'll have a basic idea of what to expect.
Some final thoughts
In the end, programs like the ones listed above aren't the most reliable way to play Windows games on your Mac, but they do give you an option.
Windows Emulator For Mac Bootcamp
Of course, another option is to run Windows on your Mac, via BootCamp or a virtual machine, which takes a little know-how and a lot of memory space on your Mac's hard drive.
How do you play your Windows games on Mac?
Let us know in the comment below!
Updated October 2019: Updated with the best options.
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