Play Steam Games On Mac Using Xquartz

1. Play Steam Games On Mac Using Xquartz Mini
2. Play Steam Games On Mac Using Xquartz Music
3. Play Steam Games On Mac Using Xquartz Keyboard
4. Steam

Steam Remote Play. Steam Remote Play allows games to be launched on one computer, while being played from other devices connected to Steam. With Remote Play Together, you can invite your Steam Friends to join your local co-op sessions remotely, without having to own or launch the game themselves.

1. One of the easiest and best ways to play PC games on a Mac is to use Nvidia's cloud-based game streaming service for macOS users, GeForce Now.GeForce Now for Mac is available right now across.
2. When the rare game was ported to Mac, you’d have to purchase the Mac-only version to run it on your Mac. These days, many of the games you already own probably have Mac versions available. Some game developers are more cross-platform than others — for example, all of Valve’s own games on Steam and Blizzard’s games on Battle.net support Mac.

I was recently introduced to a fun little board game called Ticket to Ride. It is a great way to pass the evening with friends and family. But, what do you do when you don’t have anyone available to play the board game?

Fortunately, electronic versions of Ticket to Ride are available from a lot of places. It is available from the Apple App store for your iPhone or iPad, from the Google Play store for your Android phone, from Amazon for your Kindle Fire and from Steam for your computer.

I downloaded the Android version and found that it runs fine on my phone. However, even with my new Sony Xperia Z3v, the rich details of the game overwhelm the screen on a phone. My eyes just are not good enough anymore to make out all the critical details on the phone screen. While my wife can attest that it looks great on her iPad, I don’t own an iPad.

So I decided to buy the computer version of the game as well. The purchase process at Steam was only slightly painful. Afterwards, I ended up with the Steam game launcher.

But I ran into a potential showstopper. It came after I had made the purchase, and after everything was installed. I attempted to launch the game, only to get the message that Steam requires Java 6.

It turns out that the Steam game launcher requires a very old and obsolete version of Java. Steam still using the last version of Java that was shipped by Apple, which is Java 6. This version of Java is the version that Apple first shipped back in 2013. This is because Apple is no longer supporting Java. They are leaving updating Java to Oracle. Fortunately, you can still download the Java 6 from Apple that the Steam game launcher requires at https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1572?locale=en_US.

The problem with the Steam game launcher requiring an obsolete version of Java is that the rest of the world has moved on to Java 7 or Java 8. If you are using applications that depend on Java, the odds are good that you already have a later version of Java installed.

If you do have new versions of Java, even if you do download and install Java 6 from Apple, your system may not be able to see it, because of the newer version Java installed. Some folks have suggested ways to deal with this by first removing the newer versions of Java first, then installing Java 6, and then reinstalling your newer versions of Java. In fact, if you can plow through it, that is essentially what Oracle is saying in their online post at …

Personally, I decided that that is a lot of work, and it runs the risk of messing up my machine, which has a number of JVM and JDK’s already installed. I figured that this approach was too much hassle and too much risk, just to play a single game.

So, overall, the challenge is that different applications need different versions of Java. I needed to keep the different versions of Java from stepping on each other. I have found a graceful way a way to do this, but the way that I found requires that you have several utility programs installed. These are utilities that I personally have already installed, and I have been using for some time. But since most folks don’t have these utilities installed, I will describe the process for installing each utility, in order.

If you give a mouse a cookie … or In order to run this … I need that …

I have found that easiest way for me to manage multiple versions of Java is by using a utility called jenv. The easiest way to install jenv is by using the Homebrew package manager. Homebrew seems to work best if you already have the Xcode Command Line tools installed. Installing the Xcode Command Line tools requires that you have Xcode tool installed.

Note: I know that there are Internet sites that describe how to get Homebrew working without the Xcode Command Line tools being installed first. I just found that having the Xcode Command Line tools installed first works for me, so that is approach that I am describing here.

You may not have any issues with Java, so you might try to just purchase the game Ticket to Ride, install it and see if it runs. Only if that approach fails, do you need to continue.

If the KISS step didn’t solve the issue, which it didn’t for me, then read on, and I will describe how I was able to get this game to play. My approach assumes that you need to maintain multiple copies of Java on your machine. If this isn’t your situation, and you are okay with only have an obsolete version of Java, you may want to just try to download and install Apple’s final version of Java Java 6 on your Mac and see if that is sufficient for you. I describe the steps to do that below.

Note: The final steps of the process below described below assume that you have installed the game Ticket to Ride, and that it was installed in the standard Apple Applications folder.

1.1 Download Xcode from Apple’s App Store

The first step is to download Xcode. It is available from the Apple App Store at https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/xcode/id497799835?mt=12. It takes forever to download, but it is free.

After downloading the Xcode dmg file, you will need to double-click on it to actually install it. Double-clicking on the file will open a window. In the window, just drag the Xcode icon to the Applications icon, and then agree to the license.

1.2 Install the Xcode Command Line tools

After you have the basic Xcode installed, you can install the Xcode Command Line tools. This you will need to do from a terminal window.

1.2.1 Bring up a Terminal

The Mac terminal program is located in the Utilities folder under Applications. Just double-click and it will open a terminal, which is sometimes called a command line screen or a DOS window.

1.2.2 Enter the Install Command for the Xcode Command Line tools

After opening a terminal window, enter the command to install the Xcode Command Line tools …

Once you have the installed the Xcode Command Line tools, you need to install Homebrew.

Homebrew is the package manager that the Mac should be shipping with. The Homebrew home page is http://brew.sh. Once you have experienced the ease of installing and maintaining packages with Homebrew, you will never want to go back to managing the packages on your Mac by hand.

In order to initially install Homebrew, just reuse the same terminal window that you used to install the Xcode Command Line tools. Just enter the following magic command line. Like all magic, the incantation must be entered precisely, so I recommend cutting and pasting the line directly.

At this point, some have suggested installing XQuartz, which is “a version of the X.Org X Window System that runs on OS X”. I do not have XQuartz installed, and I haven’t had any issues with Homebrew. But, if you want XQuartz, it is available as a standard Mac installer at http://xquartz.macosforge.org/downloads/SL/XQuartz-2.7.7.dmg.

Once you have installed Homebrew, testing its overall health and keeping it current is trivial. Just enter …

With Homebrew installed, installing jenv, and keeping jenv current is also trivial …

Now you just need to tell your Mac command path to use jenv. That takes a little more of shell script magic …

Note: This is just two command lines, both of which start with the word “echo”.

With jenv installed, you are in a position to work with multiple versions of Java on the same machine.

The official websites from Apple and Oracle for installing Java are listed below.

As a matter of superstition, you may want to install them in the order that they were released.

Play Steam Games On Mac Using Xquartz Mini

As you are working with the different versions of Java, that are coming from the different vendors, it is important to know that they use different directories to install the Java virtual machines.

• Apple uses /System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/.
• Oracle uses /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/.

The utility jenv doesn’t care, because you will explicitly tell it where the different versions of Java live. But, the fact that there are two ‘standard’ locations for Java virtual machines can be confusing.

4.1 Installing Apple’s Last and Final Release of Java

Apple’s final release of Java was Java 6. This is the version of Java that the Steam game launcher requires. You can download Java 6 from Apple at https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1572?locale=en_US. This will download as a standard Apple dmg installer. Double-clicking on the JavaForOSX2014-001.dmg file that you download will give you the classic package installer “JavaForOSX.pkg” in the opened window.

Double-click on the JavaForOSX.pkg package, and it will install Java 6. You may want to attempt to run Ticket to Ride from the Steam program launcher. At this point, it might even work without all the other steps involved. If that is your situation, and you don’t care if you have an old and obsolete version of Java, you are done.

But, for the rest of us …

4.2 Installing Oracle’s Java

Oracle Java JRE (Java Runtime Environment) can be downloaded as version Java 7 and Java 8. Oracle has three FAQ links that some may find interesting …

I did plow through those pages, and I wish that I could bill Oracle for those painful moments of my life. How vendors can come up with such convoluted processes in order to make things easy for folks is beyond me.

I personally prefer to just download and install the JDK, because the JDK’s always include a JRE. So here are the links for Oracle’s JDK 7 and JDK 8 respectively.

After downloading and installing the JRE’s and JDK’s that you want, you can check the standard JVM directories: /System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/ and /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/, in order to make sure they were properly installed. You should see all the versions of Java that you downloaded and installed.

Registering the versions of Java that you have installed is a little tricky. The reason it is tricky isn’t because of jenv. You just need to explicitly tell jenv which Java virtual machines you want to register, and where they are at. You do it by typing jenv add .

What is tricky is that you need to go a little bit deeper than you would on a Linux machine. Remember, this is a Mac that you are working with here. Nothing is as easy as it appear to be. Rather then pointing at /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk/, which is where you would think you should point, you need to point two folders deeper to the /Contents/Home folder that is below the Java version folder.

So, the jenv add command becomes …

Afterwards, you can check to make sure it worked by checking on which of the versions of Java that jenv knows about by typing the command “jenv versions” …

Play Steam Games On Mac Using Xquartz Music

After that, it is just a matter of telling the Steam game launcher, which version of Java to use.

Using the terminal that you previously opened, change to the Steam folder in the /Applications directory. Once you are in the correct directory, you just need to set the Java version to Java 6 for everything in the Steam Applications directory. You do these two steps by typing just two commands …

The cd command puts you in the correct directory, and the jenv local 1.6 command tells the operating system that any commands ‘local’ to the /Applications/Steam.app folder should use Java 1.6, which is really just Java 6.

Now, when you are in the /Applications/Steam folder and you run the “jenv versions” command, you will see different results then you did before …

Now, any applications that are launched from within the /Applications/Steam folder, the version of Java that they will run will be Java 6.

So, after installing Apple’s Java 6, and registering it with jenv, when I launch the Steam game launcher, and I select “Play” button, I get …

Now that I have the game working, if I practice a lot, and she is feeling generous, I might even get good enough to give my wife a run for her money. Does anyone want a Ticket to Ride?

Play Steam Games On Mac Using Xquartz Keyboard

Note: In my situation, I already had Homebrew and jenv installed. So, once I had done the research, it was simply a matter of installing the Apple version of Java 6, and setting the Java version for the Steam folder.

Steam

Those steps took about five minutes. Writing this blog so that the rest of y’all could play this fun game … that took a lot longer!