MX Simulator

jlv wrote: ↑Wed Jul 08, 2026 3:13 am Try using the most recent snapshot and use the --glversion option to try different context versions as described here. The "core" and "es" contexts might be faster than "compatibility" although with good drivers there's no real reason for "compatibility" to be slow.

jlv wrote: ↑Fri Jul 10, 2026 2:33 am The glversion option started with 2021-11-22. It's too bad it can't run newer versions. Hopefully it'll be sorted in a newer version of Wine.

Wahlamt wrote: ↑Mon Jul 13, 2026 6:00 pm They sure made CrossOver/Wine a lot harder over the years. Last I heard, someone ran Parallels with a Windows VM to get it working. Can't provide any insight anymore, my stone age 2017 MacBook just isn't keeping up with the new stuff

kawy949 wrote: ↑Sat Aug 01, 2026 7:48 am Guide

Running MX Simulator on Apple Silicon (M-series) Mac — full framerate on Alcrest

Setup: M-series Mac, macOS 26, running the 2026-05-14 64-bit snapshot. Getting 125fps on Alcrest and it plays fine on keyboard — good enough for real use. Totally free: no CrossOver or Parallels needed.

The blocker everyone hits: the modern 64-bit snapshot needs an OpenGL core context, and stock WineHQ's Mac driver refuses to create one — it rejects the request with "OS X only supports forward-compatible 3.2+ contexts" and the game dies instantly. macOS actually supports exactly the context the game wants; Wine is just being overly strict about a flag. CrossOver patches around this, plain WineHQ doesn't. One tiny change to a private copy of Wine fixes it (Wine is LGPL, so editing your own copy is fine).

The paths below are the exact ones I used — adjust if you prefer somewhere else.

Step 1 — Install Rosetta 2 (skip if you already have it)

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softwareupdate --install-rosetta --agree-to-license

Step 2 — Install WineHQ Wine (stable 11) and clear quarantine

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brew install --cask wine-stable
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Wine Stable.app"

Step 3 — Create a Wine prefix

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export WINEPREFIX="$HOME/Games/mxsim-prefix"
"/Applications/Wine Stable.app/Contents/Resources/wine/bin/wine" wineboot

Step 4 — Install the game
The installer's GUI didn't run cleanly for me, so I extracted it with 7-zip instead. (My installer was at ~/Downloads/mxsimulator-1_13-install.exe and the snapshot at ~/Downloads/mxsimulator/mx-2026-05-14-1684.exe.)

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brew install sevenzip
mkdir -p ~/Downloads/mxs-extract
7zz x -y -o ~/Downloads/mxs-extract ~/Downloads/mxsimulator-1_13-install.exe

# Copy the game data + original exe into the prefix
GAME="$WINEPREFIX/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/MX Simulator"
mkdir -p "$GAME"
cp ~/Downloads/mxs-extract/*.saf ~/Downloads/mxs-extract/CREDITS.TXT "$GAME/"
cp ~/Downloads/mxs-extract/mx.exe "$GAME/mx-1.13-original.exe"   # keep a backup

# Drop in the 64-bit snapshot as mx.exe
cp ~/Downloads/mxsimulator/mx-2026-05-14-1684.exe "$GAME/mx.exe"

Step 5 — The key fix: patch a private copy of Wine's Mac driver
This makes a separate copy of Wine so your main install stays untouched, then flips one byte so the driver stops rejecting the core context.

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# Copy Wine to your home folder
mkdir -p ~/Games/wine-mxsim
ditto "/Applications/Wine Stable.app/Contents/Resources/wine" ~/Games/wine-mxsim/wine

# Patch winemac.so: at offset 0x31b6b change 0x74 (je) to 0xeb (jmp)
python3 -c "
import os
p=os.path.expanduser('~/Games/wine-mxsim/wine/lib/wine/x86_64-unix/winemac.so')
d=bytearray(open(p,'rb').read())
assert d[0x31b6b]==0x74, hex(d[0x31b6b])
d[0x31b6b]=0xeb
open(p,'wb').write(d)
print('patched OK')
"

# Re-sign the patched driver
codesign --force -s - ~/Games/wine-mxsim/wine/lib/wine/x86_64-unix/winemac.so

Step 6 — Launch (the --glversion 4.1core flag is required; 3.2core also works)

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export WINEPREFIX="$HOME/Games/mxsim-prefix"
cd "$WINEPREFIX/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/MX Simulator"
~/Games/wine-mxsim/wine/bin/wine mx.exe --glversion 4.1core

Optional — one-click launcher. Save this as ~/Games/mxsim-launch.command and chmod +x it, then just double-click to play:

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#!/bin/bash
export WINEPREFIX="$HOME/Games/mxsim-prefix"
export WINEDEBUG=-all
cd "$WINEPREFIX/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/MX Simulator"
exec "$HOME/Games/wine-mxsim/wine/bin/wine" mx.exe --glversion 4.1core "$@"

The whole trick is the one-byte driver patch + the --glversion 4.1core flag. Without both, the gt rejected or crashes falling back to old OpenGL.

Note: the offset 0x31b6b is specific to WineHQ 11.0's 64-bit winemac.so — a different Wine versin elsewhere. If so, look for the je immediately after the "forward-compatible" check (the bytesthere are 84 c0 74 20; change the 74).

jlv wrote: ↑Thu Aug 06, 2026 3:23 am Do you know if this change is going to make it into the official Wine version?

• Lancer2004 — started the whole investigation and did the bulk of the troubleshooting, including pinning down that the game fails at modern OpenGL (3+) context creation under Wine/CrossOver on Apple Silicon.
• jlv — pointed the way to the snapshot builds and the --glversion option that makes this possible at all.
• kawy949 / Jon (mxscentral.com) — produced the actual free-WineHQ method below, including the one-byte winemac.so patch, and confirmed 125fps on Alcrest.

• An Apple Silicon Mac (M1–M5). Tested on M5 / macOS 26 / WineHQ Stable 11.0.
• The 64-bit snapshot, not the 1.13 release build. The --glversion option only exists in snapshots from 2021-11-22 onward, and this method relies on it — the plain 1.13 exe won't work. This guide uses mx-2026-05-14-1684.exe from https://mxsimulator.com/snapshots/
• The 1.13 installer as well (for the game data / .saf files) — e.g. ~/Downloads/mxsimulator-1_13-install.exe

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

echo >> ~/.zprofile
echo 'eval "$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)"' >> ~/.zprofile
eval "$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)"

brew --version

softwareupdate --install-rosetta --agree-to-license

brew install --cask wine-stable
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Wine Stable.app"

mkdir -p ~/Games
export WINEPREFIX="$HOME/Games/mxsim-prefix"
"/Applications/Wine Stable.app/Contents/Resources/wine/bin/wine" wineboot

ls "$WINEPREFIX/system.reg"

brew install sevenzip
mkdir -p ~/Downloads/mxs-extract
cd ~/Downloads/mxs-extract
7zz x -y ~/Downloads/mxsimulator-1_13-install.exe
ls *.saf mx.exe CREDITS.TXT

GAME="$WINEPREFIX/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/MX Simulator"
mkdir -p "$GAME"
cp ~/Downloads/mxs-extract/*.saf ~/Downloads/mxs-extract/CREDITS.TXT "$GAME/"
cp ~/Downloads/mxs-extract/mx.exe "$GAME/mx-1.13-original.exe"
cp ~/Downloads/mx-2026-05-14-1684.exe "$GAME/mx.exe"
ls "$GAME"

mkdir -p ~/Games/wine-mxsim
ditto "/Applications/Wine Stable.app/Contents/Resources/wine" ~/Games/wine-mxsim/wine

python3 -c "
import os
p=os.path.expanduser('~/Games/wine-mxsim/wine/lib/wine/x86_64-unix/winemac.so')
d=bytearray(open(p,'rb').read())
assert d[0x31b6b]==0x74, hex(d[0x31b6b])
d[0x31b6b]=0xeb
open(p,'wb').write(d)
print('patched OK')
"

codesign --force -s - ~/Games/wine-mxsim/wine/lib/wine/x86_64-unix/winemac.so
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine ~/Games/wine-mxsim/wine

export WINEPREFIX="$HOME/Games/mxsim-prefix"
cd "$WINEPREFIX/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/MX Simulator"
~/Games/wine-mxsim/wine/bin/wine mx.exe --glversion 4.1core

1. Automator → New Document → Application → add "Run Shell Script".
2. Paste:

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   exec "$HOME/Games/wine-mxsim/wine/bin/wine" "$HOME/Games/mxsim-prefix/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/MX Simulator/mx.exe" --glversion 4.1core

3. Save as "MX Simulator" to Applications.

• Select a specific higher resolution such as 3024x1890. "Default Fullscreen" utilises a lower resolution.

• Ground Geometric Detail — 20 meaningful gains, allows for more reasonable model texture detail
• Ground Sub-Mesh Resolution — 16x16 lowering this seems to reduce framerate unless i'm mistaken
• Ground Texture Levels — ExtraLow+Low+Mid+High
• Ground Texture Resolution — 1024x1024 seems to help a little bit, could be meaningless but any lower looks awful
• Ground Texture Update Rate — 16
• Enable Ground Mipmaps — Yes
• Compress Textures — Always
• Model Geometric Detail — 20 lower to 0-6 for a quick fps bump on heavier maps
• Model Texture Detail — 10
• Roost Density — 0
• Treadmark Limit — 0
• Terrain Sync Rate — 0
• Enable Lens Flares — Noprobably no issue enabling this
• Enable Reflections — Noprobably no issue enabling this

• The patch offset is version-specific. 0x31b6b is for WineHQ 11.0's 64-bit winemac.so. On a different Wine version, look for the je immediately after the "forward-compatible" check — the bytes there are 84 c0 74 20; change the 74 to eb. The assert in the Python snippet protects you: it writes nothing unless the byte matches.
• The patch survives game updates. It lives in your private Wine copy (~/Games/wine-mxsim), not the game folder, so swapping snapshots doesn't undo it. Only redo Step 5 if you change Wine version.
• Keep the 1.13 backup. Snapshots aren't heavily tested. If one misbehaves, copy mx-1.13-original.exe back over mx.exe, or drop in a newer snapshot the same way.
• Fresh terminal? $WINEPREFIX is per-session — re-run the export before any command that uses it.
• Model/skin packs install by dropping the unzipped folder (don't rename it or remove files) into the MX Simulator folder inside the prefix.
• Audio device: Wine grabs its output device at launch — pick your headphones/speakers as the macOS output first, then start the game.
• Live GPU stats: add "export MTL_HUD_ENABLED=1" to the launch environment for macOS's built-in Metal HUD (framerate, frame time, GPU memory).