Download for macOS · Español · How it works

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Drop an .exe, an .iso, a .zip or a game folder on the window. Proteus reads the game, works out what it needs, installs it, and leaves an ordinary app in /Applications with the game's own icon.

No bottles. No prefixes. No winetricks verbs. No choosing between WineD3D, DXVK, DXMT and D3DMetal without being told which one your game can even use.

It tells you what it found, and why

Every line has evidence behind it. GZDoom imports no graphics library at all — read its import table and you would conclude it needs nothing. It loads vulkan-1.dll by name at run time, which is why that line is there.

That is the whole idea: a Windows executable already declares most of what it needs, in structures that have not changed since the 1990s. Proteus reads them instead of asking you.

Then it checks, instead of hoping

After installing, it starts the game, waits for a real window, looks at the frame it drew, and sends actual keyboard and mouse events to confirm they arrive — before telling you it is ready.

It does not promise your game will work. It promises to tell you the truth about whether it does, and to fix what it can without you learning anything.

Install

Download the .dmg from Releases, open it, drag Proteus to Applications.

Signed with a Developer ID and notarised by Apple, so it opens on a double click — no right-click-Open, no terminal, no xattr -d com.apple.quarantine.

How it compares

	Proteus	Wineskin · Kegworks · Bottles · Porting Kit
Dependencies	Reads imports, delay imports, the manifest and libraries loaded at run time, then maps each to the exact runtime	You pick verbs from a list
Graphics backend	Chosen from what the game actually uses (d3d12 → D3DMetal, d3d11 → DXMT, d3d9 → WineD3D or DXVK)	You pick from a dropdown
Which .exe is the game	Scored by size, depth, GUI subsystem, icon, graphics imports and autorun.inf	You browse and pick
Installers	Fingerprints NSIS / Inno Setup / InstallShield / MSI and uses the right silent flags	You click through a wizard inside a fake Windows
ISOs	Mounted, autorun.inf parsed, disc name used, redistributables ignored	You mount it yourself
Icon	Extracted from the executable's resource tree, pixel art upscaled without blurring	Generic Wine glass
Verification	Starts it and confirms a window, a healthy picture and working input	Nobody does this
Disk cost	Engine unpacked once, APFS-cloned per game: ~365 MB each	~1.4 GB per game
Uninstall	Drag to the Trash. Everything lived inside the app	Bottles, prefixes and registry entries left behind

Even Proton — by far the most successful compatibility layer ever shipped — does not detect anything. It bundles translation layers and relies on protonfixes, a table of hand-written per-game patches, plus players reporting results. When a game fails there, the documented procedure is for you to set PROTON_LOG=1, reproduce the crash and read the log.

Tested on

Real installs, played interactively — not just launched — across three weight classes, because a 40 MB 2D game and a 55 GB DirectX 12 one fail in completely different ways.

Game	Arrived as	Size	What it proved
7-Zip	.msi	2 MB	the MSI path, via msiexec
Cave Story	.exe and .iso	40 MB	disc mounting, autorun.inf, keyboard-only input
Steam	NSIS installer	2 MB	a known title needing -no-cef-sandbox
OpenTTD	NSIS installer	1.5 GB	silent install omits its graphics — caught and repaired
GZDoom + Freedoom	portable .zip	1.6 GB	a renderer that appears only in run-time strings
Warzone 2100	Inno Setup	371 MB → 2.5 GB	progress on a long install; engine swap and recovery
A DirectX 12 CryEngine title	40 GB disc image	55 GB installed	the heavy path end to end

That last one is where most of the hard lessons came from. A 40 GB install cannot be redone casually, so it forced the interrupted-install recovery (proteus finish), the disk-space pre-check, real progress reporting, and the discovery that every DirectX 12 game was getting the wrong Wine engine — because the engine has to be chosen before the installer runs, which is before anything about the game is knowable. Proteus now swaps the engine afterwards without recopying a byte.

Untested and honest about it: InstallShield, and gamepads — the code is there, but no physical controller has been through it. See docs/TESTS.md, which records the failed hypotheses too.

Requirements

macOS 14 or later, Apple silicon or Intel. Nothing else — no Homebrew, no Xcode tools, no Rosetta prompt unless a DirectX 12 game genuinely needs one.

The Wine engine (~166 MB) and wrapper template (~80 MB) download once, on first use. If you already have Sikarugir or Kegworks, Proteus reuses their copies and downloads nothing.

Command line

The same engine, without the window:

proteus inspect ~/Downloads/game.iso     # say what it needs, change nothing
proteus install ~/Downloads/setup.exe    # build the app
proteus install ~/Games/MyGame --name "My Game"
proteus fix "/Applications/My Game.app"  # re-run the installer with its UI
proteus uninstall "My Game"

inspect never writes anything, so it is safe to run on anything.

Known limits

• A fullscreen game at 320×240 or 640×480 draws at native size on a black backdrop instead of scaling. That is Wine's display handling, not something Proteus can fix from outside.
• Installers that fetch optional content only when a human clicks through them arrive incomplete. The startup check catches it; proteus fix re-runs the installer with its interface visible.
• Games with kernel-level anti-cheat do not work, here or anywhere else on macOS.

Build from source

swift test              # 16 tests, under a second
./scripts/bundle.sh     # builds build/Proteus.app
open build/Proteus.app

Contributing

Reports of games that don't work are the most useful thing anyone can send. Right click the game in Proteus → Copy diagnostic report → open an issue.

See CONTRIBUTING.md. One rule: never claim a game works without having watched it work.

Licence

Free software under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later. See LICENSE.

Deliberate: anyone may use, study, change and redistribute this, and any distributed version must arrive with the same freedoms — so nobody, including its author, can take a later version closed.

Proteus ships no third-party code. Wine, the wrapper template (Sikarugir), DXMT and Winetricks are downloaded onto your machine on first use, the way Homebrew fetches a formula, and used unmodified under their own licences. See THIRD-PARTY.md.

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_{Proteus was the sea god who changed form at will — a lion, a serpent, water, fire, whatever the moment asked. "Protean" comes from him.
A Windows game becoming a Mac app is the same trick.}