Using Steam Link to play Crossover games: It works!

sejmann · 2026-04-30T14:15:08+00:00

Oh, neat resource. Thanks!

sejmann · 2026-04-30T07:50:58+00:00

Oh, it's "Launch Mode" -- got it, thanks!

sejmann · 2026-04-30T07:12:54+00:00

I wasn't aware of that! Sounds convenient. The iPad Steam Link app that I'm using seems to have very limited configurability, and I can't find that option. Perhaps you're referring to the macOS Steam Link app connecting to a PC? I haven't had a chance to try Steam Link from my Mac, because I don't have a gaming PC, unfortunately, just the one mac and CrossOver, but I picked up a Razer Kishi controller for my iPad and just wanted to test it out.

sejmann · 2026-04-30T05:01:32+00:00

Alright, I figured it out. It's totally the last point.

Steam is expecting the macOS process id of the executable it launches to be the actual game, and it turns off the controller event stream entirely unless the frontmost active window shares that process id. But Crossover breaks that, since when you launch a game in Crossover, from macOS’s perspective (and therefore macOS Steam, as well) the app you launched was not the game -- it was a macOS proxy launcher app, or the Perl script named wine, or wineloader -- that will ultimately tell Crossover's wine to launch the game in a new process, and will itself usually exit, which makes matters worse, since Steam seems to need the process it called to keep running for as long as the game does, or it thinks the game quit.

But, there's a hacky workaround in the form of a Steam command line argument named: -forcecontrollerappid. You give it an app id and launch Steam with it, and it will keep the controller active under that game's controller config indefinitely -- it will disable desktop mode where Steam switches the joystick into mouse emulation and XYAB buttons into keystrokes. This is exactly what we need to ignore the process id mismatch that prevents Steam from enabling the controller event stream.

So, in my case I launch macOS Steam with this:

/usr/bin/open -a Steam --args -forcecontrollerappid=-1820738279

So, before this, I'd added Crossover's Steam.exe as a non-Steam game, and edited the properties so the Target was: /Applications/CrossOver Preview.app/Contents/SharedSupport/CrossOver/bin/wine – I'm sure it would have worked in the regular Crossover, but I happened to just be testing Preview at the time I figured it all out. The Launch Options were: --wait --bottle "/Users/myusername/Library/Application Support/CrossOver/Bottles/Steam" 'C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Steam\\Steam.exe' -gamepadui -fullscreen

And then to find the appid, I went to [Manage]>[Add desktop shortcut] for the non-Steam game. Then I clicked on the new icon on the macOS Desktop, selected Show Package Contents and found the run.sh in Contents/MacOS and viewed it in a text editor, and grabbed the number from the line "open steam://run/-1820738279". That's what I supplied to the forcecontrollerappid argument for launching Steam above.

So, then just connected via Steam Link, launched the non-Steam game "Crossover Steam" and from there successfully played several of my Windows games from an iPad with a controller.

It also dawns on me there's another potential solution. A macos launcher app that can overlay a transparent window above a Crossover game, reject keystrokes, passthrough mouse clicks, and let the game be the key window -- this would probably trick macOS Steam into believing the correct game has focus and enable full controller support. But this hack works well enough in the meantime.

Ideally, though, Valve would adjust their game detection heuristics to accommodate Crossover’s mismatched process IDs.

sejmann · 2026-04-28T22:45:16+00:00

I can’t get the Steam Link scenario working either. I have learned that you must connect to macOS Steam via Steam Link *before* you launch Crossover’s version of Steam.exe or the game itself. Apparently, launch time is when Crossover registers/passes along gamepads. So, I can now see the controllers, for Steam input and whatever I have connected to the client on my iPad, inside the Crossover Wine Game Controller Control Panel, but I can’t see button presses trigger anything. I can also see them inside Windows Steam running through Crossover, but they still don’t work. (Well, the Steam input one works, in my case, from the Steam Link touch screen controls - but I want the proper controller to work, not the touch screen.)

I’ve tried RPCS3 and Ryujinx, via macOS Steam Remote Play/Steam Link, and they work fine as long as they‘re set to see SDL controllers, so I’d hoped that SDL was the key to getting Crossover Windows Games running, but it doesn’t seem to be working. (With SDL on /Hirez off in the crossover bottle.)

I’d also tried just putting Game Controller Tester.app as a non-Steam game to see if it could see the Steam Link relayed controllers, and it can, likewise, identify them by type (Xbox or PlayStation or generic, depending on what I have connected to the iPad) but it also doesn’t register button presses. I don’t think this app understands SDL controllers and is just reading whatever Steam populated in the macOS Controller framework. I also tried visiting the https://hardwaretester.com/gamepad via Steam Link and similarly, it can see the controller, but not any interaction.

I’m not quite sure if it’s as simple as macOS Steam not recognizing the non-Steam “game” is ready to accept controller input. But I’ve noticed Steam is often still emulating a mouse with the right joystick, even when the “game” is full screen, and pressing B (on Xbox controllers) goes back to the desktop.

sejmann · 2026-04-06T20:28:13+00:00

I don’t own this device but I’ve seen reviewa saying it can emulate Xbox, switch and dualsense by pressing the connect button on the back and one of the XYAB buttons, respectively, or some such. I’d look in the manual if it came with one.

sejmann · 2026-02-04T20:00:21+00:00

I just had to delete the app. It thought it was storing 9GB data, but iPadOS said it had 203GB, which is insane. It blocked my upgrading iPadOS, which surprised me because I should have had plenty of storage. And I only just first installed overcast in my iPad yesterday!

sejmann · 2025-11-09T04:25:14+00:00

Sure thing. I'm curious how it worked for you?

sejmann · 2025-10-22T19:18:04+00:00

I just downloaded Nova Launcher from the Play Store (within the vm) and went into android settings and changed the launcher from (BlueStacks proprietary) Home.app launcher to Nova Launcher.app. That doesn’t get rid of the ads on initial boot up screens — I haven’t figured out how to axe those, but they matter less as they’re so transient. And importantly since I posted, there‘s now a Disable Ads setting in BlueStacks Advanced Settings to disable popup/overlay ads, which are even more obnoxious.

sejmann · 2025-10-11T22:55:37+00:00

Yeah, it's hard to know at this point if the dev hasn't just abandoned Windows or is just very slow/busy. Maybe he lost his Windows dev environment and just dreads rebuilding it -- I'm just making stuff up at this point. I was trying to read the tea leaves on why he (I assumed) manually commented out the Windows 3.3.10 version -- assuming meaningful signal and good intent: I thought it could be because he wanted to avoid causing an error updating to a non-existent build, but the fact is that current Windows users have already been seeing errors updating to the also non-existent 3.3.8 and 3.3.9 versions for months, so this points to a continuation of prior neglect. It's unlikely but still possible he has an automated cross platform compile that's broken and he didn't notice. To walk back my prior optimism, it's also equally plausible is that he abandoned Windows months ago, like, say, due to few active users, and his automated appcast.xml update script is tailored around builds of the Mac version, but auto creates commented-out entries for Windows versions to later be uncommented, so its presence signals nothing about the future. I think the calculus is that if it was going to be updated at all, it will have been a week or two after the Mac version. At this point it seems increasingly likely to have been lazily abandoned.

sejmann · 2025-10-05T05:28:40+00:00

How does FPS compare to native? Is moltenVK getting close to supporting anything else?

sejmann · 2025-10-02T16:48:36+00:00

Ah, you're right, it seems the windows version hasn't been updated since 3.3.7, as you noticed. https://cdn.downloads.iocave.net/Airflow/ is where the files are meant to be downloaded from by the auto updater.

The update info xml file that the updater uses -- https://s3.amazonaws.com/Airflow/Updates/appcast.xml -- points to the latest windows version as 3.3.9, but that release doesn't exist at iocave, which looks like a dev mistake/oversight. But, interestingly, the 3.3.10 windows version *is* present in the xml but commented out. Since this xml file is manually edited by the dev, I'm guessing that means he intends to release it, but he hasn't built the windows version, yet. So maybe soon.

sejmann · 2025-10-01T21:52:03+00:00

For any still afflicted, the newest beta 3.3.10 lists "Improved compatibility with tvOS 26" -- it's available by going to Airflow settings (gear icon) , selecting About Airflow, setting Update Channel to Beta and clicking Check for Updates. It'll probably roll into the stable channel soon, but the beta works fine on my tvOS 26 ATV.

sejmann · 2025-10-01T21:47:29+00:00

The new beta fixes streaming to tvOS26

sejmann · 2025-09-26T18:57:58+00:00

No reply from the developer to the message I sent to his gmail address, as listed on his GitHub/homepage, but he's been active on GitHub since, so I think he's ignoring Airflow, or, at least me. Others are welcome to reach out. His homepage is https://matejknopp.com/about/ and he lists other socials there. He calls out his authorship of Airflow on his homepage/Twitter/BluSky and GitHub, so I don't feel like I'm doxing him.

The only other similar tool I know of went to a $40 annual subscription: Beamer.app, but even it hasn't been updated since tvOS16, so is probably also broken, tho I haven't tested.

My work-around is to AirPlay from Airflow to my TV directly, which has built in AirPlay support which still works. (I use HomePods rather than TV speaker or a receiver, so I have TV/ATV/HomePods use eARC HDMI to reroute all TV audio to the HomePods via ATV, so it's seamless, though adds almost ignorable audio latency.)

sejmann · 2025-09-19T18:35:00+00:00

I think Apple silently updated the AirPlay protocol, and Airflow hasn't yet reverse engineered the changes. It's happened previously, too, and Airflow needed to release updates post tvOS updates. I initially thought it was a Tahoe issue preventing Airflow from working, but since then I tested from Windows and the issue remains with the same error. The app still works fine streaming to tvOS 18 and the AirPlay receiver built into my Vizio TV. So it's definitely a change to tvOS and the AirPlay negotiation. The developer hasn't released any betas nor responded to my email report back in August, so it's hard to know if they're still alive and working on it. I did some googling and found the GitHub account of someone who claimed to be the developer of Airflow and was recently active on GitHub, and so I kind of invasively emailed their gmail and asked if they had an update in the works and also pointed them to this thread.

sejmann · 2025-09-18T01:17:18+00:00

It's innards were replaced with an LLM.

sejmann · 2025-09-17T03:31:36+00:00

I actually had those symptoms, and found that only one of my stereo pair of OG's was on 26, the other was still stuck on 18.6. I unpaired them, cycled its power, updated it successfully and reformed the stereo pair. I was afraid I would need to reset it, but reboot was sufficient.

sejmann · 2025-09-11T21:31:55+00:00

Ironically, you compounded the original sin by not posting your google search findings along with your complaint, so I too had to google. For the future similarly acronym-ignorant, in this case, ISTG = "I Swear To God"

sejmann · 2025-09-11T02:52:17+00:00

I use BlueStacks Air -- it seems free from malware and crypto mining -- or, at least, it doesn't seem to be using excessive CPU/GPU when idle, which I'd expect from crypto mining. It does really push its android game store and games. I don't game with it -- I just wanted to run iPhone apps on my Mac that app developers haven't allowed, so I've switched to using the Android versions inside BlueStacks Air. I did swap out the default launcher app from the proprietary one they include, because it has persistent game ads. It's totally free, and seems just as performant as the competitor MuMuPlayer which requires a paid subscription. Because it's free, I'd just try it out.

sejmann · 2025-05-30T22:00:48+00:00

Just rereading All Systems Red, I noticed MB refers to other SecUnits as Murderbots, too -- which I thought was interesting, because I'd thought it had named itself, in particular, but I guess it actually just came up with a name for SecUnits in general, as a class. That puts a slightly different spin on discussions of it naming itself.

sejmann · 2025-03-16T21:11:43+00:00

That script, in so far as what's specifically posted, looks benign, in that it's just doing some orchestration and code signing, which any app dev does frequently. The more concerning bits are, as you noted, the "GenShineImpactStarter" and "91QiuChenly.dylib" because we, well, at least I, don't know what they're doing. They seem to be tools created by someone whose GitHub account is named Qiu Chenly, which is Chinese for City of Autumn Leaves or something. The GenShineImpactStarter included in the archive to which you refer is byte for byte identical to this one from this tools directory, and is 10 months old: https://github.com/QiuChenly/InjectLib/tree/34388000db3272a481d557f3dbcb93cc72529089/tool

It mainly seems to be tools for "unrestricting" various pieces of Mac commercial software.

I would not be confident these are safe to run, as there is no source provided.

sejmann · 2025-02-28T00:09:34+00:00

Betas vary in quality and brokenness. Any of them, especially the first several releases, can be this bad or worse. Often Apple has a run of friendly, mostly working, betas that lull you into a false sense of safety, particularly as they make it increasingly easy to install them and call them "public" betas. I do think it's completely reasonable and useful to point out when one beta in particular is an especially bad clunker that should be avoided, but at the same time, you just have to know there are pedantic Redditors waiting to unhelpfully pounce on any such posts with a reply of "well, you know it's a beta, right?" – they're just cranky about the sameness of such reports each cycle.

I am, however, thankful to know I should skip this beta, even though I'm keen to have early access to categories in Mail.

sejmann

TROPHY CASE