The Sims Legacy Collection now renders
EA's 2025 re-release of The Sims draws with Vulkan, and on Apple Silicon it opened to a black window with the game running behind it. The cause was not a renderer setting: the game is 32-bit, Wine imports its own memory into MoltenVK for it, and Metal lost the device on the first frame. Highball's engine now ships a patched MoltenVK (engine x64-sikarugir10.0_6-r1) that backs that memory the way Metal accepts, switched on per game by the Sims recipe. Verified on macOS 26.6.2: the neighbourhood and lots render, Sims take orders, 117 fps at 1728x1117.
Engine updates without a reinstall
Existing installs get an "Update engine" button in the sidebar when a Highball version ships a newer engine. It downloads only what changed (the MoltenVK component is 1.6 MB), moves every bottle over, and only re-runs the Windows first boot when the Wine build itself changed. New bottles use the newest engine.
Play applies fixes for real
When Play auto-applies a fix recipe that changes the launch environment (an environment variable, the renderer, the sync mode), Highball now stops the bottle's running Steam first so the game it launches actually inherits the change.
Also in this release
- CLI:
highball bottle set <bottle> engine <id>points a bottle at another installed engine. - Manifest: engine components can declare an install order, and a component can replace a single file inside another component.
- Database: Portal 2 and Assetto Corsa re-verified on macOS 26.6.2 (Assetto Corsa now also works under DXMT there); CS:GO Legacy's macOS 26 freeze is documented with its root cause (a scheduling race inside the game's own thread pool) and no longer ships an ineffective windowed-mode workaround.
Known issues
- CS:GO Legacy still freezes at "Initializing game data" on macOS 26 on most launches; retrying escapes it roughly one time in six. Tracked in issue #21.
- The Rockstar Games Launcher installer still parks at "Preparing to Install" on every macOS version; the fix lives in Wine itself (issue tracking upstream).