CrossOver ARM64 Preview

We are elated to announce that today's CrossOver Preview build includes native ARM64 support for macOS. I share all of the juicy details below, but the big takeaway is YES, CrossOver will still be alive and thriving even when Rosetta 2 is largely discontinued with macOS 28 next year.

How we got here

As I detailed in my previous blog post about ARM64 support for CrossOver Linux, our work on ARM64 has been a multi-year project. Here are some key milestones:

• January 2023: Wine 8.0 release ships PE conversion and the implementation of WoW64 thunks. The culmination of these multi-year projects brought Wine much closer to matching Windows behavior, which allowed us to begin work to support ARM64EC mode dlls.

• January 2024: Wine 9.0 includes support for running native Windows ARM binaries and emulated i386 code.

• May 2024: CrossOver team finishes converting the CrossOver client to native ARM64.

• January 2025: Wine 10.0 release features full support for ARM64EC to run emulated x86-64 code. Achieving full ARM64 support required not only significant Wine development, but also extensive compiler development to essentially implement a brand new architecture.

• November 2025: First Linux ARM64 builds are available with CrossOver Preview after the CrossOver team finished integrating FEX to handle i386 and x86-64 emulation.

• July 2026: CrossOver team completes work to make a custom version of FEX compatible with macOS, and ships the first Mac ARM64 builds.

Where we're going

While we have made some really great progress, our ARM64 builds are still very unpolished. We pride ourselves on our regular Preview builds being relatively stable due to our very diligent QA team, but the ARM64 Preview builds are not expected to be useful for anything beyond testing at this point. These builds have some pretty big known limitations, including:

• No D3DMetal in this build. Direct3D 12 support coming soon.
• Many game launchers do not function at all.
• No way to convert existing bottles to ARM64: you will need to create new bottles for testing.

We are working on all of these issues, and we expect them all to be resolved in time for CrossOver 27 early next year.

What to test

If you're ready to help us find even more bugs in our ARM64 builds, we are very interested in your reports! Head over to the Preview Center and grab the latest builds. A few testing hints:

• The new ARM64 builds have "arm64" in the name. We also have an updated Intel build that does not include "arm64" in the name, but does include Wine 11.13 changes. If you run into an issue on the ARM64 builds, a check on the Intel build to compare behavior is highly encouraged.

• The ARM64 builds are actually universal builds that include both ARM64 and Intel Wine. The ARM64 pieces require macOS 26.5 or higher. If you are running an older OS, you will be running Intel Wine and Rosetta, not ARM64 Wine and FEX.

• The ARM64 builds also include ARM64 DXMT! If you are testing games, we recommend using the DXMT graphics option for the best result.

This Preview release is just the beginning of our ARM64 on Mac adventure. We will be iterating often in more upcoming Preview releases, so be sure to subscribe to stay in the loop.