While I'm primarily playing on a home desktop PC, I do have an old 2011 MacBook Air I carry around when out and about, so I was hoping to find a way to play Mania on the go without having to set up a dual boot since the SSD is so stinkin' small. And since Mania's saves are synced to Steam, I can continue my progress when I get back home, which is really cool. I went through a number of things before finally getting something to work. There's free Windows compatibility layers out there for Macs, such as Wine and PlayOnMac, and neither one of those would quite play nice for me. Then I found Crossover for Mac, which offers a free 14-day trial. It works beautifully and amazingly smooth, and I had no issues getting Steam installed and Mania subsequently installed. The catch with Crossover is that it costs $60 for a license if you intend to keep using it. I imagine it can be gotten other ways (I haven't checked), and if this is the only thing you're ever going to use it for, I wouldn't be too morally offended by choosing to do so; but more importantly if you're one of those folks out there that only has a Mac and no console, then 14 days should be more than enough time to beat the game a couple of times. Once you've got that done you can actually start playing immediately - using the keyboard (arrow keys for movement, A/S/Q/W are your action keys, and Enter is Start). If you want to play with an Xbox controller, you're in for more difficulty, though. The XB360/XBOne controllers don't seem to play nicely with MacOS directly at all; there's a 3rd party controller driver on GitHub, but unfortunately that doesn't quite bridge the gap into the Windows "not-emulation" within Crossover. I finally discovered Gamepad Companion, which I think costs $8 or so (there may be free alternatives, I haven't researched), and lets you map keyboard inputs to the controller inputs. This seems to work pretty well, but it doesn't seem to like any key being struck repeatedly quickly, so charging a spin dash seems to be finicky. I hope this helps anybody that was looking for a way to play this on a Mac. I didn't bother linking anything since Crossover For Mac is a quick search away and Gamepad Companion is on the app store.
Cool that you got it working with Crossover! That's pretty interesting. A side note -- games using Denuvo typically have had problems with WINE in the past, so perhaps that's related :-\
I'm actually using it with Wineskin. There's probably just as much setup as Crossover but, Wineskin is free. You'll need to select WS9WineStaging2.12 as the Engine or Steam won't open at all. It runs at pretty much full speed from what I can tell. I even extracted the icon (click the icon below to download the .icns) If you need more help setting it up, feel free to shoot me a PM.
This gives me hope that it may be possible to run Mania on a desktop Linux distro or Android, particularly the latter. I doubt my tablet could run the game even without Denuvo, but it's worth researching. If successful, I won't need a Switch or one of these things to have a portable Mania.
I have a 2012 MacBook Pro, and I've been running the game under Wine without any troubles. All I did was install and run the Windows version of Steam using wine and run it from there. I've done the same thing to run the Sonic CD port as well. Performance wise, I'll get a brief lag spike maybe once an hour? Not ideal, but perfectly acceptable for me given the conditions.
