I was recently looking into possible solutions for running vvvv on MacOS and want to bring this again on the feature agenda. We all know vvvv editor on other platforms is on the upcoming roadmap and the day will come ;)
I really also found this one Proton-like on MacOS especially interesing for the devs maybe?
However in the meantime, I might want to set up this thread to collect and exchange about running vvvv on MacOS and Linux with workarounds as virtual machines or emulators.
Other then getting a native editor per se, there are four ways:
1.) native dual boot
2.) using a virtual machine
3.) using an emulator
4.) using a translation layer
Hereās a comparison table of possibilities to run Windows applications on Mac/Linux I created during my research (obviously with the assistance of ChatGPT) and helped me to understand the tools:
Running but very unstable, however might be an option to look into it further with the devs of the tool? Also had an exportet App sucessfully running as well as various help patches (with Skia and Stride).
Requires some tweaking, very unstable, especially crahes always when using UI elements as menue, NodeBrowser, ā¦ Menu and toolbar does not show up on start.
Subscription-based
Free trial, ca. 74ā¬ / 12 months, 484ā¬ / Lifetime
Iām curious to hear from your experiences. Iāll post some screenshots below from running vvvv with CrossOver which was the most promising looking into a fast translation layer solution without having to install a full VM and Win-OS. However all solutions ar not working out of the box so far for me.
Thanks for resurrecting this topic. I too would love to run vvvv on MacOs in some way.
It would also be great to find a way to run at least compiled exeās from vvvv on MacOS, which I might try with the Game Porting Toolkit by Apple.
I guess Stride and Fuse would be most of a challenge, since they would have to be made compatible with Metal. I can imagine this being quite a lot of work.
After I just got a used Macbook with M3 Pro I installed Parallels and Windows Arm. I installed vvvv, but it wouldnāt run. Maybe I didnāt use the right build of vvvv and I will try some more.
As mentioned above, I found CrossOver quite promising when looking into a lightweight solution, however it was crashing constantly, but especially when using the editor in terms of opening the NodeBrowser, trying to use the Menu etcā¦
While only testing the help patches in the renderer window it was quite stable and however the performance looked surprisingly okay.
Here are some with Skia and Stride examples running smooth on a M1 MacBookPro. (13-inch, M1, 2020). Could not test Fuse as I could only open help patches and not install any nugets. I also tested it succesfully with one exported application (only ImGUI/Skia), so this would be also a possibility to test with CrossOver. Trial period is over now and Iām not sure how soon I might find time to look into it again - but I wanted to at least document my findings and hear about other experiences.
Canāt contribute anything to this topic, but just sharing that Iām very interested in your findings as I need to buy a new laptop soon.
ā¦ and Iām a sucker for aesthetics and find most PC laptops kind of ugly, but didnāt look at a lot.
I would prefer a sleek macbook air m4 over any kind of mobile gpu, as Iām kind of happy with Parsec when I need more hardware power when Iām on my laptop only.
not just ugly, but usually cheap materials, really shitty battery life and close to no support if anything goes wrong with them.
yeah, parsec is great. If only they had an iPad app since they already support touch if you have the Warp subscription. But I guess using an iPad with a Macbook using Sidecar should work. Iāll try that.
Unfortunately not. Also when looking at the Screenshots, you may realize that the whole menubar (quadmenu, docuement menu, patch-tabs) is missing. Would be interesting if itās different with the 7.x previews. Unfortunately the CrossOver trial is over and I also donāt find the time at the moment to test further.
That looks indeed very promising as well. I now rememember I was also trying Kegworks, but did not succeed to run vvvv. I should also add it to the list above. Maybe I was missing some of the wintricks mentioned in the instructions for Tooll3, so itās worth retrying.
The advantage would be not having to install a full second OS which is often a disk space issue.
But also great to hear it seems to run on VMs with the ARM Sdk.
How are your experiences in performance, stability and accessing in- and output devices?
I tried the attempt to get vvvv gamma started with Kegworks Winery and the T3 instructions again. Tested the current 2025-7-0-282 versions (via full package, but also via Installer), unfortunately did not succeed to start it.
One problem might be that I donāt succeed installing the donet40 Winetricks and maybe other runtime libraries/dependencies might be missing.
From winetricks for donet40 I get the following error:
warning: dotnet40 install completed, but installed file /Users/XXX/Applications/Kegworks/vvvv.app/Contents/SharedSupport/prefix/dosdevices/c:/windows/Microsoft.NET/Framework/v4.0.30319/ngen.exe not found
I found some entries in kegworks forums and it seems to be a knwon issue, but I think itās anyway not the only problem.
Is there maybe a list of all runtime libraries / dependencies which needs to be installed for vvvv gamma / which are usually installed during the installation process? didnāt find this information in the graybook.
Would I want to preferably get the vvvv gamma ARM-Version or the 64-bit version running?
When attempting to install the ARM-Version via the vvvv-installer within Kegworks, I get an error not running a compatible OS.
At least also a small success to report: I managed to run a simple exported app with Skia and ImGui via Kegworks on macOS - definitely worth further exploration.
The downside: Even small vvvv apps integrated into a Kegworks .app for macOS will become quite large (>2GB-4GB) due to the necessary system implementations and additional runtimes. :/
The howto doesnāt mention dotnet40 and it shouldnāt be necessary for running vvvv anyway I think. For T3 they install dotnetdesktop6, most likely this needs to bedotnetdesktop8 for vvvv.
Just linking the Parallels/ARM thread to this one, as this definitely belongs here and is valuable information:
Looks like @u7angel has had success running the regular stable version emulated in Parallels, as well as an actual ARM build which only was waiting for a Stride PR which was merged 2 weeks ago:
It seems @Elias was actively following up on this recently, as more things happened around this. He probably knows when/if thereās some ETA of this :)
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