From Day 1 to RunsOnMac // Idea to - Reality

Day 1 — August 26, 2026 RunsOn Mac started out of a very simple frustration: I was tired of spending hours searching for games that actually run well on my Mac. Every time I wanted to play something new, I ended up searching through Reddit posts, YouTube videos, forums and random websites just to answer a simple question: Does this game run on my Mac, and if it does, how well? The information was out there. It was just scattered everywhere. So I had a simple idea: Why not build one place that collects all of it? RunsOn Mac started as a local index.html, connected to a Google Form and Google Sheet. Users could submit their Mac, game, settings and actual performance. That was Day 1. --- The First Real Version Things moved quickly. Within the first few days, the local prototype became an actual website with around 50 games, individual game pages and real community performance reports. But Google Forms and Sheets were only good enough to prove the idea. RunsOn Mac needed its own infrastructure. So the project moved to Supabase, and the original report system evolved into a real benchmark database. Performance could now be structured around: Game + Mac + Settings + Resolution + FPS + Runtime Method Native, Rosetta 2, CrossOver, GPTK and other ways of running games could be represented separately. RunsOn Mac was no longer just asking whether a game supported macOS. It was trying to answer: How does this game perform on this specific Mac? --- Becoming a Platform Over the following weeks, the project expanded far beyond the original prototype. The game database grew. Mac hardware became directly connected to benchmark results. Steam information became part of the platform. Community benchmark submissions moved directly into RunsOn Mac. runsonmacs.com went online. And the project gained an architecture designed to eventually power both the website and a native macOS application for Intel and Apple Silicon Macs. RunsOn Mac had started becoming more than a compatibility list. But there was still one major limitation. --- Community Data Wasn't Enough There are thousands of games and many different Mac configurations. Waiting for someone to manually submit every possible combination would never create the database RunsOn Mac was supposed to become. At the same time, huge amounts of useful performance information already existed across the web. So RunsOn Mac started building its biggest system yet: Autonomous benchmark research. A crawler could search the web for existing Mac gaming performance reports and turn previously scattered information into structured data. But automatically collecting internet data created a new problem: How do you know whether it is actually trustworthy? --- From Research to Confidence Instead of simply dumping crawler results into the database, RunsOn Mac developed a complete validation architecture. Today, the pipeline works around: Research → Enrichment → Validation → Evidence Comparison → Confidence Discovered information can be connected to the correct game and hardware, checked for plausibility and compared against other independent observations. For stronger validation, a result can be compared against at least three additional observations. RunsOn Mac also separates its data into different layers: Community Benchmarks Submitted directly by RunsOn Mac users. Web Research Performance information discovered through automated research. Verified Data Information that has passed stronger validation requirements. Instead of pretending every benchmark is equally reliable, RunsOn Mac can build confidence as more evidence becomes available. --- Scaling Up By October, the crawler had grown from an experiment into real infrastructure. The system can now perform up to: 50 research iterations every 15 minutes. RunsOn Mac can monitor successful research, rejected results, failures, source problems and processing times. If something goes wrong, active crawler processes can also be stopped centrally. The original database has effectively evolved into a system capable of finding, structuring, comparing and evaluating new Mac gaming information itself. --- Day 42 — October 7, 2026 42 days after the original idea, RunsOn Mac is approaching its first public release. What started because I was frustrated with spending hours trying to find games for my own Mac has become: A dedicated Mac gaming data platform with community benchmarks, hardware-specific performance data, automated research, validation and confidence scoring. The technology changed enormously. The reason behind it didn't. I wanted a place where I could find a game, select my Mac and simply see: How does this game actually run on my Mac? Find your Mac. Find your game. See how it actually runs.

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