Over at Snazzy Labs, Quinn Nelson has a great in-depth look at the changes coming to Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit with macOS 27 this fall. Paired with Metal 4, it’s a real leap over what’s possible today, and Nelson showcases the difference well.
Thanks to the upcoming update, Nelson was able to use CrossOver, a Windows-to-Mac compatibility layer that allows PC games to be played on a Mac, to spotlight some impressive numbers on games ranging from Red Dead Redemption to the recently released 007 First Light.
Not all games Nelson tried showed the same leap in performance, but that’s true on compatibility layers like Proton on the Steam Deck, too. What’s remarkable is that it’s all done in software and as Nelson points out, the advent of coding agents like Codex and Claude may help bring more PC games to Mac using the Game Porting Toolkit by reducing the porting costs.
Nelson also makes a pitch for an Apple gaming device. I agree with him that more than ever, the pieces, right down to a hardware-focused incoming CEO, are all there for such a device, and I remain optimistic. However, I’ve made the case for such a device for years now to no avail. Still, whether or not Apple builds gaming hardware itself, watch the full video above. It’s a fantastic view of how far the Mac has come as a potential gaming platform since the advent of Apple silicon.
It’s a new month and it’s F1 season, which means it’s time for a roundup of everything coming to Apple TV and Apple Arcade in May 2026.
This month we’re adding F1 and other sports airing on Apple TV this month, starting with tomorrow’s Miami Grand Prix, and continuing below with the Canadian Grand Prix and Friday Night Baseball at the end of the month.
Sunday will see the very first U.S.-based race of the 2026 Formula 1 season in Miami, Florida. In addition to Sunday’s race, Apple TV subscribers can watch qualifying round coverage beginning today at 3:25 PM Eastern U.S. time, with qualifying beginning at 4 PM and the race itself beginning at 4 PM Eastern Sunday.
Apple has also created a 3D view of the race track in Apple Maps, a Maps Guide of local hot spots for race attendees, an Apple Music playlist that Apple says captures the energy and excitement of F1, and many other race weekend tie-ins you can check out in this Apple press release.
The game I’m most excited about this month is Perchang World, an update to a classic indie game first released about a decade ago. The version debuting on Apple Arcade for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV is an evolution of the original physics puzzler that requires you to use a variety of switches and platforms to guide balls through the game’s brightly-colored, playful environments. The game is narrated by British comedian James Acaster, who judging from the game’s trailer, adds a great sense of humor and fun.
If you’re a fan of pool, Ultimate 8 Ball Pool+, an Arcade adaptation of the HypGames’ App Store version will be available for Arcade subscribers on May 7 too. The game features photorealistic graphics and 3D perspectives as well as one-on-one multiplayer, tournaments, trickshot challenges, and more.
Next Thursday, Apple Arcade will also release Nick Jr. Replay!, a family-friendly game starring characters from Nick Jr. shows like Dora the Explorer and Blue’s Clues & You! and over 50 minigames designed to help kids with math, reading, art, and other learning skills. Finally, Good Pizza, Great Pizza+ is an adaptation of an App Store game, but without In-App Purchases. The game is a cooking simulator where your goal is to take orders, bake pizzas and get them to customers.
Unconditional promises to start May off with a bang. The brand new thriller follows Orna, whose daughter Gali is arrested for drug smuggling in Russia. The eight-episode show follows Orna as she fights for her daughter’s freedom, which pulls her into the dangerous criminal underground of Moscow.
Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed is a dark comedy/thriller starring Tatiana Maslany as a newly divorced mom who believes she witnesses a murder. Deciding to investigate what happened, Maslany’s character, Paula, is drawn into what appears to be a dangerous larger conspiracy, while also dealing with a battle over custody of her child.
Star City is Apple’s For All Mankind spinoff. Based on the same alternative history events where the Russians land on the moon before America, the show follows the story from the perspective of the Russians. The eight-episode show follows Russia’s cosmonauts, scientists, engineers, and government officials as they race to the moon.
Propeller One-Way Night Coach is an Apple Original movie based on a 1997 children’s book of the same name. The film, which is John Travolta’s first directorial credit, follows Jeff, who loves airplanes, and his mother as they travel to Hollywood. Their one-way journey transforms everyday travel into an adventure filled with an unusual cast of characters.
Round 5 of the 2026 Formula 1 season will take place against the skyline of Montreal, Canada from May 22-24. The semi-permanent 4.36 km track is on Île Notre-Dame, a man-made island in the St. Lawrence River. F1 racing on Circuit Gilles Villeneuve began in the late 70s and has a reputation of unpredictable weather that can cause chaos on the track.
It’s hard to believe that Apple is in the midst of its fifth Friday Night Baseball season. In May, viewers will be treated with the following two game lineup every Friday:
May 8
Minnesota Twins at Cleveland Guardians (7:00 PM Eastern)
St. Louis Cardinals at San Diego Padres (9:30 PM Eastern)
May 15
Toronto Blue Jays at Detroit Tigers (6:30 PM Eastern)
New York Yankees at New York Mets (7:00 PM Eastern)
May 22
Houston Astros at Chicago Cubs (2:00 PM Eastern)
Detroit Tigers at Baltimore Orioles (7:00 PM Eastern)
May 29
Minnesota Twins at Pittsburgh Pirates (6:30 PM Eastern)
Philadelphia Phillies at Los Angeles Dodgers (10:00 PM Eastern)
That’s it for May. I’m personally looking forward to Perchang World and Star City the most. If you’re a Club MacStories Plus or Premier member, drop by the TV and Movies channel in Discord to chat about what you’re looking forward to from Apple TV this month, and be sure to listen to MacStories Unwind, where I’m sure Federico and I will cover some of these shows and games, along with our other media recommendations every week.
If you follow our show NPC: Next Portable Console, you probably know about GameHub, an app from controller maker GameSir. GameHub first appeared on Android, where it has become one of the hottest recent developments in handheld gaming because it lets you play Windows PC games on Android devices. That’s not something that’s possible on iOS or iPadOS, which Apple tightly controls through the App Store, but macOS is a different story altogether, which is why GameSir is bringing GameHub to the Mac.
Currently in beta, GameHub isn’t the first to bring PC games to the Mac using a software compatibility layer, but it’s one of the more user-friendly implementations, thanks to tight integration with Steam and the Epic Games Store. In fact, GameHub itself is a fork of the Winlator open-source project. And, while it’s still early days for PC games on Android and even earlier for PC games on the Mac, GameHub’s beta is making steady progress as Russ Crandall of Retro Game Corps showed off in his most recent YouTube video:
Of the 20 games Crandall tried, none of which are otherwise available on the Mac, about 60% were playable. As on Android, some games required some tweaking to get them working, but overall, the results were impressive, especially when it comes to games like Pragmata, which has only been out for about a week.
What GameHub for Mac demonstrates is just how capable Apple silicon is. The compatibility layers built to run Windows games on Android, and now the Mac, are complex, but at its core, it’s the sheer horsepower of ARM-based processors that makes this possible, regardless of the OS they run. It also makes me wonder why Apple doesn’t turn its Game Porting Toolkit that helps developers translate PC games to the Mac into a consumer product. It’s been done before with Whisky, a SwiftUI wrapper around the Game Porting Toolkit and Wine, but that project is no longer maintained. It strikes me as a great way to expand the gaming universe on the Mac and encourage more developers to support macOS directly. Maybe we’ll hear something from Apple on the topic at WWDC in June.
In the meantime, you can visit the GameHub website and join its Discord server where you’ll find instructions on joining the beta. And, if you’re interested in learning more about how GameHub and similar solutions work on Android and Mac, a good place to start is with NPC, Episode 48, Steam Emulation on Android Gets Real.
Top-tier games continue to roll out on Apple’s platforms at a steady clip. Recently, Crimson Desert landed on the Mac on the same day as other platforms, and then last week, Control: Ultimate Edition added support for the iPhone and iPad, joining the Mac version that was released last year.
Today, Cronos: The New Dawn, a survival horror game by Bloober Team, joins the Mac gaming scene via Steam. In a post-apocalyptic, retro-tech setting, you play as the Traveller, who has been sent on a mysterious mission by a group called The Collective. Not long after you set out on your quest, you realize you aren’t alone. The landscape is littered with corpses that merge into mutant, zombie-like enemies that you have to fight off with a combination of weapons and melee attacks.
Cronos debuted on the Xbox, PlayStation 5, Switch, PC, and Linux last September, but I didn’t play it on any of those platforms. Instead, I dove in fresh when I got the chance to try it on the Mac, thanks to a few days’ early access. I haven’t played very far into the story yet, but despite not being a huge fan of horror games, I was immediately captivated by the game’s incredible sound design, retro tech vibe, and creepy story.
With limited time, I focused on the game’s performance on two Macs: my M1 Mac Studio connected to a 4K ASUS display and an M4 Max MacBook Pro, both on its own and connected to a BenQ 5K display I’ve been testing. As I expected, the difference between the two Macs was noticeable, showing just how far Apple silicon has come in terms of gaming. My Mac Studio may still pull its weight when it comes to productivity tasks, but the M4 Max MacBook Pro operates on an entirely different level.
Bloober Team is no stranger to Apple silicon, having released The Medium with Metal 3 support for Apple silicon in 2023. The experience shows in the studio’s incorporation of both MetalFX upscaling and hardware-accelerated ray tracing in Cronos.
By default, Cronos’ MetalFX and ray tracing settings are turned off, but both are worth trying along with frame generation because they make a big difference. After some experimentation on my M1 Max Mac Studio, I landed on a pretty consistent 70-75 FPS at 1440p with the help of MetalFX and frame generation. Hardware-accelerated ray tracing isn’t supported by Apple’s M1 family of chips, so that wasn’t an option at all.
As you’d expect, performance was much better on the M4 Max MacBook Pro, which does support hardware-accelerated ray tracing. Starting with the default settings and playing on the MacBook Pro’s display, I turned on ray tracing, MetalFX, and frame generation and got a consistent 55-65 FPS, and turning off ray tracing bumped that more consistently into the 60s. The game struggled a little bit when I connected to an external 5K display, but with a few more tweaks, it was running well, too.
What’s clear is that Cronos pushes the Mac’s hardware hard and that Apple’s latest gaming technologies make a big difference in performance. On the MacBook Pro, the fans spin up loudly soon after starting the game; plus, if you don’t have your laptop plugged in, you may be prompted to switch to Low Power Mode pretty quickly. However, the overall experience on Apple’s most recent hardware has come a long way since the M1 chipset, and with every hardware revision, more games like Cronos become viable. And whether you play it on the Mac or not, Cronos: The New Dawn is worth checking out for a creepy futuristic good time.
The gaming ecosystem on visionOS continues to grow, this time with the announcement that Steam Link is coming to the platform. The official app will allow users to wirelessly stream games in 2D from Steam on their local Macs and PCs to their Vision Pros. According to the company, the app can stream games at up to 4K resolution and includes an adjustable, curved panoramic view. A TestFlight beta is now available for those who want to test the app before its public release.
Steam’s stature in the PC gaming market cannot be understated, so opening the platform up to the Vision Pro is a huge boon for gaming on the device. Of course, one would hope to see VR streaming support come with time, but official support even for 2D gaming is a big step.
NVIDIA has released version 2.0.83 of its GeForce NOW game streaming service with a couple of upgrades for Vision Pro users. First, games can now be streamed at up to 4K resolution at 90 FPS. Gaming at this quality requires a subscription to the service’s Ultimate tier and a Wi-Fi connection with a speed of at least 55 Mbps, and users have to enable 4K resolution manually in their settings. Still, it’s great that game streaming of this quality is available to those who want to play cloud-streamed games on a huge virtual screen, and the 4K option is a Vision Pro exclusive not available on other headsets. It’ll really put the device’s powerful screens to good use.
This version of GeForce NOW also coincides with the gradual rollout of H.265 video encoding in supported browsers. Because the service is still accessed via Safari on Vision Pro rather than a native app, H.265 browser encoding will be beneficial for the efficiency and quality of game streaming on the device.
This news comes on the heels of foveated streaming support coming to Vision Pro with last week’s release of visionOS 26.4. Apple and NVIDIA worked together to include support for NVIDIA’s CloudXR technology in the framework, giving developers a way to take advantage of foveated streaming in their own VR games and apps. Flight simulator X-Plane, motorsport simulator iRacing, and 3D visualization tool Autodesk VRED have already committed to adopting the feature on visionOS, and I imagine we’ll hear more similar announcements soon.
The full gaming story on Vision Pro is yet to be told, but these developments – along with the integration of spatial controllers into visionOS last fall – point towards a bright future for gamers on Apple’s newest platform, and I’m happy to see Apple working with partners like NVIDIA to make the experience as enjoyable and immersive as possible.
I love when my interests collide, and today, thanks to Russ Crandall, that’s exactly what happened. You see, Crandall runs Retro Game Corps, a YouTube channel covering the world of videogame emulation, handheld consoles, mini PCs, and more. It’s an excellent channel that we’ve covered multiple times on NPC: Next Portable Console, and yesterday, Crandall made a video exploring the MacBook Neo’s emulation capabilities.
It turns out that the Neo pulls its weight with more than productivity apps. It’s also does quite well with game emulation, some Steam titles, and streaming, with a couple of caveats.
Seeing is believing when it comes to emulation, so it’s worth seeing how your favorite systems fare before diving into emulation on the Neo yourself, but I was surprised to see how well the Neo did even on systems as recent as the Nintendo Switch 1. Beyond the GameCube, it’s hit or miss what will run well, but older systems like NES, Game Boy, GBA, SNES, PS1, PSP, 3DS, PS2, Dreamcast, and Saturn games all ran well and in most cases at upscaled resolutions and with shaders applied.
Probably the biggest limitation Crandall ran into is when he tried running games from more recent systems on external storage over the Neo’s USB-C 2 port, while using the USB-C 3 port for a capture card. Games from more recent systems are larger, so for anyone who wants to stream their gameplay, the Neo’s 256GB or optional 512GB internal storage could be a limitation.
That said, I was pleased to see how well the MacBook Neo handled emulation. Paired with lighter-weight Steam games, streaming on services like GeForce NOW, thanks to the Neo’s Wi-Fi 6E, and the App Store’s own catalog of native games, the Neo offers a lot of options for your downtime too.
It’s once again time to get ready for a new month of movies, shows, and games on Apple TV and Apple Arcade. Here are the highlights of what’s in store for March 2026.
Originally slated to launch in December, The Hunt is a French-language thriller starring Benoît Magimel that debuts today. Also starring Mélanie Laurent, the series follows Franck (played by Magimel) and his weekend hunting buddies, who come across a group of hunters that target them. When one of the group is attacked, Franck and his friends flee and keep the events a secret. Soon, though, they start to wonder whether they are still being hunted.
The big Arcade release this month is Oceanhorn 3: Legend of the Shadow Sea, an action-adventure RPG from Cornfox & Brothers, a Finnish developer. This is the third installment in a series that has been an App Store standby for more than a decade, featuring a mix of big battles, island exploration, and puzzle-solving. It’s a visually stunning epic adventure that’s playable across iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and Apple Vision Pro.
More Arcade Additions
Three other games that have been adapted from popular App Store titles will make their debut on Apple Arcade alongside Oceanhorn 3, too:
Pocket Love!+: A family-friendly life sim where you move into a new home with your partner and pet.
Flow Free+: The pipe-connecting, color-matching puzzle game.
Apple’s Formula 1 coverage kicks off this weekend with the Australian Grand Prix. Apple is the exclusive U.S. broadcast partner for Formula 1, bringing all F1 races to Apple TV. This weekend’s coverage includes the race, qualifying, sprint sessions, and bonus coverage. Also available to Apple TV subscribers through a partnership with Netflix is docu-series Drive to Survive.
Twisted Yoga is a documentary about a tantric yoga school whose members were looking for community and wellness, but wound up wondering if they’d joined a cult.
Based on the novel Imperfect Women by Araminta Hall, Apple TV’s adaptation starring Elisabeth Moss and Kerry Washington studies the effect of a crime on three women over their decades-long friendship. It’s a thriller, taking viewers on an emotional roller coaster that considers how the choices we make impact our lives.
Apple has been making some great shows for kids, and Wonder Pets is no exception. The show follows Izzy the Guinea Pig, Tate the Snake, and Zuri the Bunny as they travel the globe in their Jetcar, rescuing animals in operatic musical fashion. It’s a fun premise that is worth checking out with your kids later this month.
One of Apple TV’s longest-running series, alternate history space drama For All Mankind, is back for season five. In the wake of the Goldilocks asteroid heist, Happy Valley has become a bustling colony with thousands of citizens. However, tensions between the inhabitants of Mars and Earth continue to build.
That’s a wrap for March. I’m personally looking forward to The Hunt and Imperfect Women. If you’re a Club MacStories Plus or Premier member, drop by the TV and Movies channel in Discord to chat about what you’re looking forward to from Apple TV this month, and be sure to listen to MacStories Unwind, where I’m sure Federico and I will cover some of these shows along with our other media recommendations every week.
Ollie’s Arcade was launched in 2023 by The Iconfactory with three mini-games reminiscent of beloved classic videogames. Today, the company launched a Kickstarter campaign with the goal of raising $20,000. If reached, The Iconfactory will make Ollie’s Arcade free and bring its game Frenzic to the bundle. Frenzic was one of the earliest iOS game and a fan favorite that was later adapted for Apple Arcade, but has since left Apple’s subscription gaming service.
From a bigger perspective the Kickstarter is yet another way we’re trying to sustain ourselves and keep the Iconfactory up and running. We all know times are tough, especially for small, non-investor driven businesses like ours. We’ve struggled to pay our salaries, keep up with the rising cost of health care and to compete against the onslaught of AI driven design solutions. The new KS won’t be enough to solve all our revenue problems, but it will help give us runway to keep the lights on while we find new ways to stick around and serve you. The more we raise now, the longer and safer that runway gets.
The Iconfactory has a long and stories history since it was founding in 1996. Since then they’ve produced some of the most thoughtfully designed apps and icons around. The Iconfactory isn’t the only company whose business has been hurt by generative AI, but I sincerely hope it isn’t one of the fatalities too. Check out the Kickstarter campaign and chip in to help them and make some great games free for everyone. And while you’re at it, don’t miss all the other great apps they have on the App Store like Tapestry, Tot, Triode, xScope, and many other.
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