Whisky is no longer actively maintained

Is there any hope that Proton might eventually work on MacOS?

If valve thinks they can make money on it. Which hasn’t happened yet. I guess we are all just waiting for The Year of the Mac Gamer Desktop

Steam in a Crossover bottle is a similar experience. It would be neat to have built-in support from Valve.

Probably not unless Apple provides a way to run 32-bit binaries or some really dedicated hacker figures out a way to make it work. Even Valve's own titles have 32-bit macOS versions (e.g. Portal 2) that won't work on modern macOS, so Proton on macOS today would only work with more modern 64-bit games. Not a problem for some people, but Valve really likes to support everything.

Apple is free to contribute but short of that I don't see why it would be worth anyone's time to fight such an uphill battle.

Their disposition re Vulkan and Metal tells me all I need to know. Until that tune changes, I don't have any hope.

Wine's WoW64 build can run 32 bit Windows binaries. Apple's support for running 32 bit macOS binaries isn't relevant for running 32 bit Windows binaries, as long as Wine itself is 64 bit and calls 64 bit system libraries.

The more pressing concern is the eventual removal of Rosetta 2. It hasn't been announced so far, but it's unlikely that Apple will keep maintaining it forever.

One problem for that is that most 32bit games use x87. x87 optionally supports 80 bit floats so Rosetta runs software emulation for x87 math code. That's extremely slow to the point of making even some ancient games unplayable. For example the FMod audio library, which was extremely widespread, uses x87.

Linux x86 emulators work around this by offering an optional reduced precision mode that turns those into either 64 bit or even 32 bit floats. Some even do it by default.

Microsoft also does that with their Prism x86 emulator. They can be somewhat confident in doing that as Microsofts compiler stack has defaulted to configuring the x87 hardware to use 64 bit floats.

Apple should really add that as an option to Rosetta but I doubt that's gonna happen simply because it only impacts 32 bit code.

> Valve really likes to support everything

I believe Valve is still sour from Apple discontinuing 32 bits x86 support and killing a big part of the Steam game catalog with macOS Catalina. It's not impossible to port Portal 2 to later macOS versions, there's a port for the Nintendo Switch so it runs fine on ARM.

Apple is notorious for being capricious, I understand if Valve wouldn't want to risk investing too much effort in that ecosystem.

Besides, the SteamDeck has finally opened the way to cut the OS middleman, why would they work towards that yoke again?