Playing on Mac or Linux
Preface
To play Mega Man Maker on MacOS and Linux, first you need to download Wine.
Wine is a compatibility layer that allows you to run Windows software on Mac and Linux. Given that it is open-source and has no help from Microsoft, it is amazing it works as well as it does. However, Wine is an incomplete product and is not perfect. Games may fail to run or you may experience bugs when running them under Wine. You may need to do some tweaking to get games working properly, and they may break after Wine updates. Some games — especially newer ones — won’t run no matter what you do.
Wine is ideal only when you’re running one of the few games it properly supports, so you may want to research it ahead of time. Don’t use Wine expecting it to run any Windows program you throw at it without bugs or tweaking.
First and foremost, use wine to install DirectX 9.0, it is very important to run the game. Then use it to run Mega Man Maker's executable.
Another method is to install a virtual machine with a windows OS. Works for both MacOS and Linux.
Instructions
For a more up-to-date guide on playing Mega Man Maker on macOS, see this Reddit post by r/immaterialist. Below is a copy of the post.
If anyone else has been hoping to play Mega Man Maker on your mac, here's what worked for me.
Computer specs I'm running: macOS Big Sur 11.4, MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013), 2.3 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7, 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3, Intel Iris Pro 1536 MB
Steps:
- Download & install the latest version of Crossover (I used 20.0.4)
- Download Mega Man Maker (I'm using 1.7.5) and then be sure to unzip it.
- Load Crossover and click the big button at the bottom to Install a Windows Application.
- Type in "Mega Man Maker" in the search bar and click to install it as an unlisted application, then hit continue in the bottom right.
- In the section to select installer, click on Choose Installer File and navigate to wherever you unzipped the Mega Man Maker folder and open the MegaMaker.exe file within Crossover. Click continue.
- I think it defaults to selecting Windows 7 as the bottle and it'll take you to the Install & Finish screen. Click install.
- Search online for .NET framework 4.6.2 and download it from Microsoft's website.
- Open the installer package with Crossover and follow the prompts to set up installation. Be sure to install the .NET framework in the exact same bottle you used to install Mega Man Maker! (dunno if it'll work otherwise)
- Follow all the prompts to keep installing all the various parts of .NET framework. There's a lot of them and a lot of restarts within Crossover.
- Once all that's installed, click to select your Mega Man Maker bottle in the column on the left, then double click the Run Command button.
- Click on the Browse button next to the command line, navigate to where you saved MegaMaker.exe, then hit Run (or save command as a launcher).
- Enjoy playing on a mac!
Note: this is only what worked for me and I've no idea if it'll work on other systems this way. Also worth noting that Crossover has a free trial period of like two weeks and it's $39-$59 after that.