Zero Hour running natively on Apple Silicon (D3D8 → Metal, no Wine/DXVK)

[dvcdsys]

Made this for fun for myself and it ended up fully playable, so sharing: a macOS-only fork that runs Zero Hour natively on Apple Silicon — a direct D3D8 → Metal shim, no Wine/DXVK/MoltenVK anywhere in the stack.

Upfront: this was built with heavy use of AI coding tools. I'm not hiding that — the goal was a playable game, not a hand-crafted monument. Every fix is verified in real gameplay, and each release ships a symptom → cause → fix changelog, so you can judge the work by its results.

Working: skirmish, singleplayer campaigns, Generals Challenge, save/load, replays. Rendering looks clean — I haven't spotted any visual glitches in normal play (terrain, water, particles, shroud, UI all behave). Memory stays flat (~1.3–1.4 GB in-game).

It's not just a 1:1 port either — a few engine niceties came along the way:

• proper high-resolution support — runs correctly at native Mac display resolutions (no tiny-UI or squashed-viewport issues)
• 120 fps rendering, with game-logic timing decoupled from the render loop (sim speed stays correct at any frame rate)
• a dedicated water shader
• a brand-new Guard from Position mechanic ("dual guard"): a unit holds its home spot while watching/attacking a zone around a second point, and returns home once the threat clears. The engine side works for any unit, but ready-made command buttons currently only exist for the CWC mod — so that's where you can try it today
• plus a long tail of smaller fixes

Most of my testing actually happens on a total-conversion mod rather than vanilla — I'm a big Cold War Crisis (CWC) fan, so that's what I play daily. It runs fully on this build, which was a nice stress test: a TC swaps out pretty much every asset the renderer touches.

There's a small launcher app that downloads the engine and keeps it updated, so non-technical users don't have to build anything — just bring your own game assets (nothing copyrighted is included).

Repo: https://github.com/dvcdsys/GeneralsGameCode-macOS

It's intentionally a divergent fork (Windows CI / VC6 support removed, so nothing here is upstreamable as-is), but happy to answer questions about what it took — the D3D8→Metal layer, \-path normalisation at the fs boundaries, and a lot of stubs that had to stop failing silently.

Huge thanks to TheSuperHackers — none of this would exist without this project.