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The question probably speaks for itself. I know that they're Windows-based games, so inherently a copy of Windows must be available. That precludes using DOSBox, but would any of the following solutions (or others) work?

  1. Boot Camp with Windows 7?
  2. VMWare with a Windows version of the appropriate vintage?
  3. WINE? (Is WINE even available for Mac?)
  4. Profit! (Oh, wait ... Um ... Fill in #4 for me?)

Details of the machine in question: MacBook 13", integrated 256M graphics, 4GB of RAM, 2GHz Intel Core Duo.

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  • I feel for you. On Windows 7 I had to do some consider tweaking to get everything up and running and I still had problems viewing videos.
    – ChaosPandion
    Commented Jul 7, 2010 at 19:41
  • All of those will work by the way. For Mac, there's Darwine but CrossOver has better support. However, it does cost money.
    – user56
    Commented Jul 8, 2010 at 13:15
  • You can also use wine-devel 1.0.1 which is the developers branch of wine. it's just about as stable.
    – Ritwik Bose
    Commented Jul 11, 2010 at 12:19
  • Just install VMWare with Win98 and install the games. WinXP works too with all Fallout patches. The main problem is that those games are very buggy to begin with.
    – ayckoster
    Commented Nov 15, 2012 at 0:47

5 Answers 5

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19

I personally attempted this a while back. I ended up buying the actual Mac version of the game:

http://www.amazon.com/s/?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=fallout+mac

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  • 3
    I was completely unaware that there were Mac versions of these ... You rock.
    – John Rudy
    Commented Jul 7, 2010 at 19:41
  • 2
    For what it's worth, I did end up buying the Windows version of the trilogy, if only because it's about $11 + shipping, and the Mac version has a ton of reported problems now that newer Macs don't support 256-color mode. It'll either go through WINE, VMWare or BootCamp. (Probably starting at WINE.)
    – John Rudy
    Commented Jul 17, 2010 at 14:45
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As of November 2012, GOG started offering the games in Mac format. Both Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 were offered. This was probably be the best/most affordable way to get the games. Fallout Mac CDROMs on Amazon seem way much overpriced (due to their scarcity I assume).

Update 1/1/2014: Unfortunatelly GOG has removed all Fallout games from their catalog. As discussed on reddit this is probably due to Interplay's publishing rights on the franchise expiring. The games are now only available for download to those who have already purchased them. The games have also been removed from Steam and it is unclear whether/when a new distribution agreement will be made with Bethesda, who now holds the publishing rights.

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  • Hear, hear. GOG is awesome. FWIW though, Amazon offers the PC-download as well.
    – Jon Mabe
    Commented Jun 4, 2013 at 17:14
  • 1
    It is indeed gone due to the rights transferring to Bethesda, andthey're definitely scheduled to come back on Steam. GOG is still a bit up in the air at the moment, but I know GOG themselves wanted to keep them, so it's all down to Bethesda now.
    – Michael Madsen
    Commented Jan 4, 2014 at 19:44
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    The tweet from Bethesda has a promising tone. I was afraid there would be some bitterness against GOG because they were giving away the games for free 1 month before the expiration of Interplay's publishing rights. Bethesda could have perceived this as an agressive move against them (loss of future sales). Glad to see they are cool with GOG.
    – m000
    Commented Jan 5, 2014 at 0:21
  • @m000 Interesting — I signed up for GOG literally only for free Fallout. (I’m such a bad/non-gamer, though, that I had confused Fallout with Bioshock. I enjoyed Fallout anyway!)
    – Alan H.
    Commented Mar 25, 2015 at 4:07
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    Fallout 1 & 2 are available from GOG again and have returned to Steam quite some time ago.
    – DarkDust
    Commented Aug 28, 2015 at 19:43
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Try installing WineBottler http://winebottler.kronenberg.org/. It's a nice frontend for Wine (which it brings with) and can package your game into a nice little .app.

FWIW, I was able to run Fallout with it. Didn't try Fallout 2, though.

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  • Very nice! I fought through WINE using MacPorts, which worked out OK, and then wound up writing a shell script to launch from Finder.
    – John Rudy
    Commented Jul 30, 2010 at 17:19
  • Still works fine with wine on macOS Mojave (10.14.2.) Just had to edit fallout.cfg to update some paths to the game files.
    – Fabien Snauwaert
    Commented Apr 15, 2020 at 22:31
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Both Fallout 1 and 2 are now available as Mac versions from gog.com:

Update: The Fallout games have been removed from the gog.com catalogue by the end of 2013 (due to legal issues with the owner of the Fallout franchise). The best way to play the games on a Mac now probably is to buy them on Steam and then use wine to run them in OSX...

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  • just for a note, the Fallout & Fallout 2 downloads for Mac currently available on Gog.com (as of March 2015) do NOT run on the latest OS X, although with a bit of annoying Wineskin manhandling, the situation is not unfixable. (Please don’t ask me how here)
    – Alan H.
    Commented Mar 25, 2015 at 4:05
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Assuming you have or can get the necessary files (I downloaded mine from GOG, updated the Wineskin to be Yosemite compatible, and downloaded patches), you my also be interested in using the hi-res patch, which can be done using these excellent instructions for Mac. It worked for me.

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  • I'd also suggest the Fallout Restoration Project. It unlocks content that was shipped with the game but was not included.
    – Mazura
    Commented Jul 17, 2015 at 2:33

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