Parallels Desktop Ubuntu ARM64 virtual machines with Zero-K pre-installed.

• While the repository is named Zero-K-MacOS, it is not limited to MacOS. The steps used to create the virtual machines can be used on any system that runs ARM
• The launcher will look as though it's not doing anything, and is frozen, but this is fine and just a result of the translation. The game will start eventually, so give it time. Only give up if it's been more than 15 minutes.
• Steam login support is a WIP. For now its unsupported and it's up to you to get it working.
• Due to media libraries not being emulated, animated effects (such as bullets, fire, etc.) will not be rendered

The virtual machines are built on top of Parallel's Ubuntu ARM64 virtual machine.

For the most part, the virtual machines are stock Ubuntu ARM64 installations with Box64 pre-installed.

Zero-K is grabbed from the semi-portable itch.io releases and extracted to the desktop. The game is run by doing box64 Zero-K.bin.x86_64 which will start the game and use Box64 to translate the x86_64 calls to ARM64.

Make sure you have Parallels Desktop installed on your system. You can download it from here.

1. You can find the latest virtual machine image here. Follow the instructions in the release description for extracting it
2. Open Parallels Desktop and click on File -> Open... and select the virtual machine that you downloaded.
3. The virtual machine will now be added to Parallels Desktop. Right click on the package and click on Open Package. This will unpack the virtual machine.
4. Once the virtual machine is unpacked, you can start it by double clicking on the package.
5. The virtual machine will now boot up. By default the password is sugondese. You can change this by running passwd in the terminal.
6. You'll be greeted with the desktop environment. The VM's are distributed infrequently, so the VM images are likely to be heavily outdated. Make sure you update the VM by running sudo apt update and then sudo apt upgrade in a terminal.
7. You can now start Zero-K by double clicking on the icon on the desktop. You can read the README file on the desktop for more information, but for the most part it's a copy of this.
8. Enjoy playing Zero-K!

If you want to set this up outside of a Virtual Machine, don't trust the pre-installed releases, or just want to set it up manually for fun, follow this guide. You need to have Desktop ARM64 Ubuntu already set up and running. I would highly advise using a minimal installation where possible, and note that I have only tested this with Ubuntu 24.04. If you plan on using a different version, ymmv.

1. Install Box64 using the pre-compiled binaries. You can also try FEX Emulator for better performance, but I haven't tested this nor gotten it to work.
2. Restart your system
3. Download Zero-K from the itch.io portable releases
4. Run sudo apt install libsdl2-2.0-0 libopenal1 libcurl4 in a terminal
5. To run Zero-K, you can run box64 Zero-K.bin.x86_64 in terminal. Make sure you are in the same directory of the game when running this. If this works, you can stop here. If it doesn't, keep going with the guide.
6. Run sudo apt install mono-complete libmono-system-windows-forms4.0-cil libcurl4 libmono-system-runtime-serialization4.0-cil libmono-system-net-http4.0-cil libgtk-3-dev
7. Try running it with the same command as in step 5, or try mono Zero-K.exe. If both of these fail, you're on your own from here.