CoD2 Silicon

Call of Duty 2 multiplayer, native on Apple silicon. CoD2x 1.4 compatible.

CoD2 Silicon ports the reconstructed opencod2 engine to native macOS arm64. It runs directly on Apple silicon, with raw mouse input, native audio and an OpenGL renderer. Bring a licensed copy of Call of Duty 2: no game content is included.

Status

The 0.2.0 release is playable on stock 1.3 and CoD2x 1.4 servers, with a native launcher and server browser. Movement, firing, grenades, mounted turrets, HTTP mod downloads and round restarts have been tested, and every menu is opened by an automated sweep. Smoother frame pacing and active Game Mode remain goals. See the verified results below for compatibility coverage, rendering comparisons, fullscreen limits and measured performance.

Requirements and game data

• An Apple silicon Mac; Intel Macs are not supported by this port.
• macOS 13 or later.
• Your own licensed Call of Duty 2 1.3 game data and CD key.
• The original Steam Mac copy enables matching shaders; without it the app uses approximate shaders, with visibly different lighting.

Keep the game outside this repository. The data folder must contain main/iw_00.iwd through main/iw_15.iwd and matching localized archives. Existing Windows 1.3 data works too; the Mac executable is needed separately for shader extraction. See getting your game data.

Install

Prebuilt app

1. Open GitHub Releases.

2. Download CoD2-Silicon-0.1.0-macos-arm64.zip and SHA256SUMS into the same folder. Verify the archive, then unzip it:

   shasum -a 256 -c SHA256SUMS

3. Move CoD2 Silicon.app to /Applications and open it.

The app is ad-hoc signed and not notarized. On macOS 15 and later, open it once, then go to System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway. Alternatively, after verifying your download:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/CoD2 Silicon.app"

From source

git clone https://github.com/STiXzoOR/cod2-silicon && cd cod2-silicon && ./scripts/install.sh

The installer needs Swift 6 (Xcode 16 or later), the Xcode Command Line Tools and CMake and explains how to get them. It downloads and builds the pinned SDL release itself (no Homebrew), compiles the client and installs ~/Applications/CoD2 Silicon.app. No original game binary is needed to build. A locally built app is not quarantined, so Gatekeeper does not block it.

First run and playing

Open CoD2 Silicon.app to use the native SwiftUI launcher: Play, a server browser with favorites and recents, settings, demos/screenshots and update checks. It finds the game folder automatically or asks you to choose the folder containing main/. If no CD key is stored, it asks for yours and saves it in ~/.cod2/preferences. Never share that file or your key. It extracts the original shaders from your own Steam Mac copy when available, otherwise continues with approximate shaders. Configs, logs, demos, screenshots and the shader cache live in ~/Library/Application Support/CoD2 Silicon.

Use Play to enter the original multiplayer menus, or join from the launcher server browser. Quitting the game returns to the launcher; a game crash leaves the launcher open with a link to its crash report. You can also open a cod2x:// server link (including while the game is running):

open -a "/Applications/CoD2 Silicon.app" 'cod2x://connect/127.0.0.1:28960'

For a direct CLI launch, run the app executable with --play. Append --exit-after-game to close the launcher when the game quits, or pass trusted engine arguments after --. Settings include 1080p–6K, the frame cap, vsync, raw mouse, audio and native fullscreen Spaces. Metal options are marked as upcoming until the native renderer is integrated.

Replace the address with your server. For a source install, use the app under ~/Applications instead. The default settings target 1080p fullscreen, a 250 fps cap, vsync off and raw mouse input. The cap can be set anywhere from 0 (no cap) to 1000. Competitive CoD2x servers enforce their own 125–250 fps caps.

Known limitations

• No microphone/voice capture; no intro cinematics.
• No standalone native dedicated-server binary yet. Use the client executable with +set dedicated 1 +map mp_toujane and your normal data arguments.
• Frame-pacing hitches remain; active Game Mode and quiet-desktop display restoration still need acceptance testing.
• Some rendering and mod edge cases remain. A server restart during an HTTP download can stall it; reconnecting recovered in the tested case.
• This engine inherits security-sensitive networking, file parsing and memory behavior from an old reconstruction. It is not hardened. Use trusted content and servers; see SECURITY.md.

Verified results

The 0.1.0 port is playable, with further stability and frame-pacing work ahead. Verified development results include:

• Online stock 1.3 (protocol 118) and CoD2x 1.4 (protocol 120) play: movement, firing, reloading, round restart and respawn; HTTP mod downloads also worked. The sessions were short and mostly on empty servers. Online report
• CoD2x's 68-row compatibility inventory has 41 implemented, 12 native equivalents, 2 partial and 13 excluded or server-owned behaviors. This is implementation coverage, not 68 live acceptance tests. Match-service UI/backend validation remains partial; the auto-updater is excluded. Compatibility report
• With the original Mac shaders, three matched Toujane views have RGB mean absolute errors of 2.0050, 1.8726 and 0.5856 out of 255 against Windows. Full post-processing, shadows and combat FX parity are still unverified. Rendering report
• Fullscreen rendering up to 6016×3384 (6K), with desktop-fullscreen fallback when an exclusive mode is unavailable. Fullscreen report
• A ten-minute combat soak completed without a crash after fixing the first-shot stencil-clear fault. Playable-app report

WS18 measured these two-minute live combat captures on a Mac mini with Apple M6, macOS 27.0.1 and original Mac shaders:

Render size	FPS cap	Average FPS	1% low FPS
1920×1080	333	331.2	205.2
1920×1080	Uncapped	798.6	354.1
2560×1440	333	332.4	233.0
2560×1440	Uncapped	663.5	326.8
3840×2160	333	332.3	230.8
3840×2160	Uncapped	417.1	256.9

The 1440p and 4K runs rendered at those sizes on a 1080p physical display using desktop fullscreen. Other user applications were running. A 1% low is the reciprocal of the mean of the slowest 1% of frame intervals. These are measurements, not guarantees of steady frame pacing. Game Mode activation is unverified. See the roadmap.

Building for development

Read CONTRIBUTING.md for the complete merge gate and data requirements. Development builds need SDL2-compatible development libraries (the port was tested with SDL3 + sdl2-compat; scripts/build-sdl.sh builds the pinned versions) and Python 3.9+. No proprietary input is needed: arm64 builds compile the committed typed-data snapshot in build/lp64_gen/, described in typed-data generation.

cmake -S . -B build-macos -DCOD2_X64=ON -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
  -DCMAKE_OSX_ARCHITECTURES=arm64 -DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=ON
cmake --build build-macos --target cod2_macos --parallel 3
cmake -S . -B build-macos-codx -DCOD2_X64=ON -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
  -DCMAKE_OSX_ARCHITECTURES=arm64 -DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=ON \
  -DCOD2_FEATURE_CFLAGS=-DCOD2_CODX=1
cmake --build build-macos-codx --target cod2_macos --parallel 3

COD2_CODX=ON is not a CMake option: use the feature flag shown above. The original i386 Linux and Windows paths retain their build instructions in the upstream README; WebAssembly has its own build guide.

Path	Contents
src/PC, src/Mac	Reconstructed engine and renderer
src/platform	Native macOS display, input, audio and system adapters
cmake, tools, tests	Build definitions, verification and test fixtures
docs/macos-port	Development log and report index, compatibility and parity research

Credits and license

Built on opencod2, with behavior research from CoD2x, cod2engine, CoD2rev_Server and KisakCOD, and native support from SDL, Apple frameworks, libcurl and zlib. Most port code and analysis was written by OpenAI Codex and Anthropic Claude Code agents, then verified with test suites and live server play. Full credits and provenance

MIT covers this project's own changes after opencod2 410342a. Upstream opencod2 declares no license and retains its authors' rights; third-party licenses remain applicable. Read NOTICE.md for scope.

“Call of Duty” is a trademark of Activision. CoD2 Silicon is not affiliated with Activision, Infinity Ward, Aspyr or the CoD2x project.