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Grapple

Support

Stuck? Let's get you playing.

How to reach us, how to send a diagnostics report, and fixes for the problems we've actually run into while testing games.

Getting help

  1. Check the common problems below and your game's page in the game compatibility list. We publish results per game as we test them.
  2. If that doesn't solve it, create a diagnostics report for the game that's failing.
  3. Send it to us with the game's name, what you did and what happened (an error message or a screenshot helps). The quickest way is Report a problem in Grapple: it builds the report and opens an email already addressed to us, so you only have to attach the zip. Pro subscribers get priority support.

Questions about billing, your licence key or your Macs? Most of it is on your account page and in the pricing FAQ. On the Free plan one game runs forever — claimed the first time you play it, swappable once every 30 days — and Pro plays your whole library.

Create a diagnostics report

A report collects what we need to see what went wrong, in one zip file.

  • In the app: select the game and choose Report a problem.
  • In Terminal: run grapple report <bottle> — the CLI still uses bottle as its technical name for the isolated Windows environment a group of games runs in. The zip is saved to your Desktop (or wherever you point --out).

What's in it

  • The configuration of the Windows environment the game runs in: engine, graphics layer and the settings you changed.
  • Basic system information: Grapple, engine and macOS versions, Mac model, memory, GPU, free disk space and whether Rosetta 2 is running.
  • Grapple's logs for that game, and the tail of the Steam client's logs if Steam is installed.
  • Recent game logs and crash reports (Unreal Engine and Unity games), capped in size.

Your macOS username and home folder path are replaced with <user> in every text file. The report is created on your Mac and isn't sent anywhere until you attach it to an email — feel free to open the zip and look through it first.

Common problems and fixes

My change did nothing, or the wrong game or Steam opened

Check which group of games you changed. Grapple keeps each group — Steam, GOG, Epic, and games you added yourself — in a separate Windows environment with its own settings, launcher install and games, so a change made in one does nothing for a game running in another. Quit everything, then start the game from the group it's installed in. grapple info <bottle> shows that environment's engine and graphics layer.

My game's graphics settings reset after I quit

Change settings in the game's own options menu, not by editing its config files. Many games write their config files when they exit, which overwrites changes made by hand while the game was running.

Low frame rate on a base M-series chip

On base chips (M1, M2, M3, M4 without Pro or Max), heavier recent 3D games tend to be limited by the GPU, not the CPU. You can check: while the game runs, this Terminal command shows how busy the GPU is. Close to 100% means the GPU is the limit.

ioreg -r -d 1 -c IOAccelerator | grep -o '"Device Utilization %"=[0-9]*'

What helps when the GPU is the limit:

  • Pick the game's Low preset, or lower the resolution.
  • In Unreal Engine games with TSR (Temporal Super Resolution), set the render resolution to 67–75%. It reduces the GPU load while keeping the output at your screen resolution.
  • Give it a few minutes: the first minutes in a new game or area stutter while shaders are compiled and cached. Judge performance after that.

The game warns about an NVIDIA driver

This only appears if you've been experimenting with GPU spoofing — making the game believe it runs on an NVIDIA graphics card. Undo that change and the warning goes away. If you see it without having changed anything like that, please send us a report.

An online game won't start because of anti-cheat

Games that need a kernel-level anti-cheat driver can't run in Grapple or any other Wine-based tool, and there's no setting that changes that — only the game's developer can. Read why anti-cheat blocks Mac players for the details and the alternatives.