Question :
My children have played the ‘ultra-retro Disney’ game Cuphead on their friend’s PC and they love it. So now they want to play it on their own Mac also. Unfortunately there is no Mac version available yet.
What can I do ?
Answer :
There are various ways to solve your problem, and they all boil down to trickery to play the Windows game on your Mac : installing Windows (like Bootcamp, Parallels, VM Ware or VirtualBox) or some form of WINE (= the ‘Windows without Windows’-virtualization called “Wine Is Not an Emulator”, like WineBottler, WinOnX or PlayOnMac) or NVIDIA GeForce NOW cloud gaming.
It turns out that the simplest way to get the Cuphead game running on your Mac is this :
- get (buy) the Cuphead game (Windows 10 version) in the Microsoft Store here
- find the Cuphead.zip or Cuphead.rar in your downloads and unzip/unrar it
- make sure you have both the setup_cuphead_xxxxxx.bin and the setup_cuphead_xxxxxx.exe files
- then get the PlayOnMac virtualization-app here
- download and install the PlayOnMac-app
- now, right-click on the setup_cuphead_xxxxxx.exe file
- in the pulldown-menu, choose “Open with PlayOnMac”
- now the installation (in an app-like container) will start
- this will take some time, just ignore any error messages
- when PlayOnMac asks for the location of the setup_cuphead_xxxxxx.bin file, locate it on your Mac and proceed the installation
- again, ignore any error messages
- when PlayOnMac asks you to create a Cuphead game-alias on your Desktop, do it
- when the Cuphead game-alias appears on your Desktop, it might have an icon of a non-runnable application ; ignore that
- drag&drop the Cuphead game-alias on the Dock (in most cases, the icon will now change to the yellow-squared Cuphead icon)
- then exit PayOnMac
- finally open the Cuphead game-alias in the Dock and the Cuphead game will run
That’s it !
enjoy 😉
Note : depending on your screen-settings, there may be weird looking edges on the top and/or bottom part of the screen while playing the Cuphead game, this is one of the little downsides of using PlayOnMac…
MacManus.nl 
Hi, I bought the game on the Microsoft store following your link but from a mac cannot see how to download the zip / rar file. Where did you find that? It hasn’t auto downloaded to my machine.
@David Tomlinson :
Sorry to hear this doesn’t work for you yet.
The problem is that Macs cannot connect to the URLs used by the Microsoft Store, as they start with :
ms-windows-store://
The easiest workaround is to borrow someone’s Windows10-PC and logon to the Microsoft Store to download the game there,
then copy it over to your Mac using a USB-stick.
You could also use a VM (like VirtualBox or BootCamp) on your Mac, but for that you will need a recent Windows-installer also.
(You will need Internet Explorer 10, Internet Explorer 11 or Microsoft Edge to use the Microsoft Store)
…and that is exactly what you were trying to prevent…
Too bad that PlayOnMac does not support Internet Explorer 10 or newer yet…
Hi,
How do you find the cuphead.zip or cuphead.rar. file? I have used a friend’s computer to download the game. Where should I search to find the cuphead.*** file?
@rtjmca @aggiename :
If your friend hasn’t moved or deleted the file, it would be in the Downloads folder.
In Windows, you can just do a search for “downloads” to find the Downloads folder.
Or you can manually go here :
This PC > Windows (C:) > Users > [username] > Downloads >
Or here :
C:\Users\username\Downloads
enjoy 😉