CrossOver : Win -> Mac

David Schwartz · January 18, 2021

I've been workign on a new little app, and in particular looking at the TMS FNC cross-platform library to let it run in a Mac environment (among others).

I remembered something from a while back and pulled down the latest version of CrossOver from CodeWeavers to try out. It seems to be a very simplified VM for MacOS that lets you load up Windows EXEs and launch them. They execute internally using Wine rather than Windows. The initial setup was a bit confusing, but once I got it sorted out, I realized there's simply a folder there that contains your EXE -- and you can load up as many as you want into it.

Your host's file system seems to be mapped to Z: drive, and it lets you reach out from inside the "bottle" into the host (Mac) environment and copy in Windows EXEs.

When I ran it, I was quite surprised to see my app launch and run as if it's a native MacOS app, but it looks and acts exactly as if it's running in Windows.

I think Parallels has something that lets you do this, but I never tried it. In fact, I licensed CrossOver in mid-2019 and it expired before I ever did anything with it. (Their license is for one year.)

Does anybody have any experience with this?

Makes me wonder how Delphi would run if it was stuffed into CrossOver? Has anybody tried, by any chance?

Arnaud Bouchez · January 18, 2021

From my experiment, Delphi has a lot of troubles running under Wine. IIRC Delphi 7 starts, but debugging is not possible. Newer versions didn't start without some dependencies.

So Wine is not an option for the Delphi IDE itself.

On the contrary, regular VCL apps work well on Wine, if the UI components are almost standard.
You may also check https://winebottler.kronenberg.org/ which is a way of packaging a Win executable into a Mac app, embedding Wine with the package.

January 18, 2021

hi @David Schwartz

if you dont know it, maybe "DOCKER" can help you!

Before VM was the create boom for install another OS into your OS hosts, but the new orders is "Containers" - or be, part of OS is virtualizated with your app, not necessary all system at all.

In App Store from Microsoft, you find some linux flavor like Ubuntu - most indicated for Delphi use.

Then, here some links about "Docker" and Delphi and MSWindows

https://geekflare.com/docker-architecture/

https://fernandorizzato.com/2019/04/23/docker-no-delphi-academy/

https://blog.marcocantu.com/blog/2019-december-getting-started-delphi-docker.html

https://docs.docker.com/

https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac/install/

Fernando Rizzato is Embarcadero MVP Leader from South Americ - videos in Portuguese-Brazil (but he have youtube account with videos in English)