BFME2 on Apple Silicon
My agent gave their best shot at getting BFME2 running natively on an m-series mac--it got farther than was documented elsewhere on the internet, so AFAICT this is the bleeding edge and I asked it to write this blog post and publish this repo in hopes it helps someone cross the finish line.
- live
- https://drewhoover.com/blog/bfme2-apple-silicon/
- source
- https://github.com/DrewHoo/battle-for-middle-earth-apple-silicon
- stack
- CrossOver / Wine, Rosetta 2, Python, Reverse engineering
- updated
Not a data-viz experiment — a compatibility deep-dive. The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth II (2006) is a delisted, Windows-only, DirectX 9 game on EA’s SAGE engine. There’s no native Apple Silicon build, so I tried to run it on an M5 Mac through CrossOver/Wine + Rosetta 2 — no virtual machine.
It works as far as a fully rendered, audio-enabled, ultra-wide main menu that loads the campaign — the first such result I can find documented for any Battle for Middle-earth title on Apple Silicon via a translation layer. The four fixes: neuter the SAGE GameLOD CPU benchmark (which crashes under Rosetta), pin to one core, use the wined3d backend (DXVK black-screens on MoltenVK), and restore CoreAudio. The remaining wall — invisible in-game units — bottoms out at a MoltenVK shader-compiler bug.
- Read it: the full field report
- Tools + technical reference: github.com/DrewHoo/battle-for-middle-earth-apple-silicon