How to play Caesar III on MacOS with M1 silicon
Video and step by step walkthrough - how to install Caesar III ready to play using Crossover on MacOS with M1/M2 chips.
n.b. also see our guide to playing in widescreen hd natively on MacOS using the Julius project.
Prerequisites
Before getting started there are a couple of things that we need.
- First of all we need a copy of Caesar III ready to install. We recommend that you obtain the version that GOG have produced here. It costs buttons, is DRM free, and we’ve tested it, it works!
- Crossover from Dreamweavers, here. Crossover comes with a cost - if you can find a working discount code, you should be able to pick it up for around £30. We could not get Caesar III working on PlayonMac on our M1 MacBook Air, and we understand that Virtual Machine approaches (ie parallels) will not currently work (though we’ve not tested that.
Once you have Codeweavers and a copy of Caesar III, you are all set and ready to play Caesar III on your shiny new M1 Mac.
First up, open up your Crossover install, and select the Install a Windows Application button at the bottom of the screen.
Type the name of the application you want to install - in this case Caesar III. Ignore the two star rating saying that the game will install but not run. Thats mince. Click continue.
On the next screen that loads we need to select the installer. We are not going to use the default Install via Steam option, we’ve not tested that that. Instead select Choose Installer File.
Select the install executable, and then click continue.
Next we need to tell Crossover what type of Bottle to create. Again, we do not want to create a Windows 7 64-Bit bottle. Most old Windows games need to run in a 32 bit environment! Choose the option for the Standard Windows XP Bottle - even though Crossover says it is incompatible!
Finally click the install button to create the bottle, think of a bottle as a discreet virtual machine, and watch Crossover run its magic.
Click on the checkbox to accept the EULA agreement, and then click on the install button to begin the process of installing Caesar III on you M1 Mac.
After watching the install progress you should arrive at the install complete screen - click exit from here rather than launch game, as Crossover still needs to finish off tidying up the bottle.
Wait until you also receive the installation complete screen within Crossover itself:
You should now see a Caesar III bottle on the left hand panel of Crossover - click on that, then click on the Caesar III icon within to load the game.
Enjoy the opening credits as Caesar III loads:
Click on the Start new career button and follow the prompts to get started playing Caesar III:
Finally, your game will load ready for you to begin your Governorial career on Caesar III - even though everything above says this will not work (it does)! Enjoy the game!
