A developer says Call of Duty: Black Ops II now runs as a native app on Apple silicon Macs, at almost 60fps in all areas. The claim is the developer's own and has not been independently checked.
The developer wrote that they built a tool, with help from Claude Opus 5.5, that takes your Steam copy of the game and converts it into a native ARM64 Mac app. The method is static recompilation done ahead of time: the game's existing machine code is translated into ARM64 code once, before anyone plays, rather than being handled on the fly. The developer said no emulator is involved, naming Wine, CrossOver and Rosetta as things the project does not use. The test machine was a 2020 MacBook Pro.
The developer listed the working parts: the full campaign, local multiplayer with bots, and local Zombies with all DLC maps, provided you own them on Steam. Split-screen, which the PC version never had, is in progress and described as coming soon. LAN mode is on the roadmap for later. The one stated problem is heat, which the developer said still needs fixing.
The approach differs from the usual way Windows games reach a Mac. Rosetta is Apple's translation layer for Intel software, and Wine is a compatibility layer that supplies the Windows interfaces a game expects. Both add a layer between the game and the hardware. A recompiled build skips that layer, which is why the developer calls performance the best part. The tradeoff is labor: each game needs its own conversion, and the output has to be tested across every mode.
The more interesting detail may be the credit to an AI model for the tool itself. If the results hold up, the story is less about one 2012-era shooter than about how much recompilation work a single hobbyist can now get through. The post had 16 points and no comments when it was captured, so nobody outside the project has yet reported whether the 60fps figure and the thermals survive on other Macs.