A fan recompiles Black Ops II for Apple Silicon, with Zombies near 60 fps
The beta builds from the player’s Steam files. Its published M1 results are encouraging, while online play and several everyday reliability checks remain outside the demonstrated set.
Black Ops II’s Windows executables have found another assignment: becoming native ARM64 code on a Mac. The fan project bo2-mac does the translation ahead of time, then supplies a custom runtime for the Windows calls the game expects. Even the zombies have to appreciate a second life.
The repository describes a pipeline using Remill and LLVM, with Direct3D 11 rendered through Metal. The maker reports translating roughly 150,000 functions across campaign, Zombies and multiplayer executables. Small sections hidden by copy protection, plus missed translations, still use an x86 interpreter. The native label therefore comes with a specific implementation worth reading.
The maker reports 57-60 frames per second for most tested solo Zombies maps on an M1 with 16GB of memory. Die Rise is listed separately at 43-58. Campaign and bot multiplayer appear in the results too. Those figures belong to this project’s measurements on that machine; they don’t establish what your Mac will deliver.
The beta status document places a welcome boundary around the demo. It lists other Macs and fresh user accounts among the unproven cases. Campaign missions still need end-to-end play, including the ordinary business of saving, quitting and resuming. A title screen can survive a demo while a weekend playthrough finds something entirely different.
Ownership also shapes distribution. The README says “each player builds their own,” because the resulting application contains the game’s translated code. The repository supplies no game files or ready-made game app. This is an unofficial fan effort, and buying Call of Duty: Black Ops II for the wrong platform won’t satisfy a build that specifically expects the Steam executables.
The toolchain instructions name the developer tools involved and say the script checks prerequisites before starting. They also describe building translation tooling on the first run. Anyone hoping for the familiar drag-an-icon-to-Applications ritual should make room for a compiler’s idea of an afternoon (bring patience).
The toolchain document says the build refuses to proceed with less than 8GB free. Its cleanup instructions distinguish disposable intermediate files from the linked binaries. The immediate practical question is whether there’s enough disk space to complete the conversion without treating your normal working drive as an experiment in optimism.
A build that runs the campaign and a build that has survived every campaign mission are different milestones. The beta document preserves that distinction without diminishing the engineering needed to reach either one. The less spectacular tests will decide whether this becomes a curiosity you show a friend or a game you actually keep playing.
Ahead-of-time conversion offers a tempting future for software whose original operating environment keeps getting harder to recreate. Each project still has to replace the surrounding services the executable expects. Here, the unresolved work includes the very familiar act of leaving a game, coming back and trusting your place is still there.
The zombies are back. Co-op isn’t.