Attention

August 2023 update: osu! Wineskins for macOS, osu!macOS Agent, and this osu!mac documentation website is no longer officially supported or maintained. Official support will no longer be provided by the authors of these respective projects on the osu! forums. You can read more information about this change from Technocoder and aidswidjaja. Thank you for everything.

osu! was unable to obtain a graphics context

This article is applicable to the following wrappers:
• slc’s Wineskin for macOS 10.14 Mojave and earlier
• Technocoder’s Wineskin with macOS Catalina 10.15 support
• Technocoder’s unofficial Wineskin for macOS 10.14 Mojave and earlier

Behaviour

osu! crashes on startup, displaying an error message that says osu! was unable to obtain a graphics context.

Pop-up dialog: osu! was unable to obtain a graphics context.

Cause

Note

A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that osu! used DirectX. It has now been corrected. Please see issue #8 on GitHub for more information.

This usually occurs because a user enabled Compatibility Mode in osu! settings, or changed to a screen resolution that Wine couldn’t handle.

Standard osu! uses OpenGL which is supported by the Wineskin, while Compatibility Mode will use ANGLE / OpenGL ES which is not supported by osu! Wineskins. This explains why osu! will crash with OpenGL ES-related errors on Compatibility Mode.

Resolution

  1. Find your user profile/configuration file.

    • Locate where osu!.app (your Wineskin) is installed

    • Right click on it and select Show Package Contents

    • You should now see three files/folders: Contents, drive_c and Wineskin. Click drive_c.

    • From here, click osu!.

    • From here, locate osu!.yourcomputername.cfg and open this file in a plain text editor such as TextEdit.

For example, my configuration file is osu!.Adrian.cfg and it looks like this:

osu! user configuration file.

Tip

The default name for this file is usually osu!.Apple.cfg

Note

Don’t get confused with osu!.cfg which is a completely different and much smaller configuration file.

Danger

Heed the warning and don’t share this configuration file with anyone else, not even us. It contains hashed versions of your passwords.

  1. You’ll need to either delete or change a number of screen resolution options if you don’t know which is causing osu! to crash. If you know what option is breaking osu!, then you only need to modify/delete that specific option, as listed below.

Compatibility Mode

If you enabled Compatibility Mode and now osu! won’t start, find the CompatibilityContext option.

Tip

Use Command + F in TextEdit to quickly search for CompatibilityContext.

Note

osu!macOS Agent will automatically disable Compatibility Mode as part of its troubleshooting steps.

If you did enable it, it would look like this:

CompatibilityContext = 1

Change this to:

CompatibilityContext = 0

Then, start osu!

If you can’t find CompatibilityContext

Add the following line to the bottom of osu!.yourcomputername.cfg:

CompatibilityContext = 0

Then, start osu!

Screen Resolution

If you changed the screen resolution to something a bit weird, find these options:

  • Height

  • Width

  • HeightFullscreen

  • WidthFullscreen

Tip

Use Command + F in TextEdit to quickly search for these options.

Then, change the values accordingly to your last known previous settings, or to the recommended values as shown below. You can also delete them to have osu! initialise everything for you again.

Preferably:

  • Height and Width should be Wine’s specified screen resolution (or otherwise, a standard screen resolution like 1920x1080)

  • HeightFullscreen and WidthFullscreen should be your computer’s effective/scaled screen resolution.

Find Wine's specified screen resolution

If you’re using Virtual Desktop on the X11 driver and need to modify Height and Width:

  1. Locate where osu!.app (your Wineskin) is installed

  2. Right click on it and select Show Package Contents

  3. You should now see three files/folders: Contents, drive_c and Wineskin. Click Wineskin.

  4. Click Set Screen Options

  5. Locate the Screen Resolution dropdown as shown below - what it is set to is Wine’s specified screen resolution:

osu! screen resolution dropdown menu, within the Screen Options menu in Wineskin.

In this example it is 1920x1080. Therefore, Width = 1920 and Height = 1080.


Find your fullscreen resolution

To find osu!'s fullscreen resolution, you need to know your current scaled resolution for the monitor you're playing osu! on.

Your scaled screen resolution on this monitor is x where:

  • Width =
  • Height =


Now, replace the corresponding Height and Width values in osu!.yourcomputername.cfg with those displayed above.

If that didn’t work

There could be something else going on here, and performing basic troubleshooting should help you get to the bottom of it.

If you’re not sure what’s going on here, copy any osu! crash logs as well as generating a report with osu!macOS Agent, and let us know on the forums.

Note

Random side note that may or may not be useful to you: (i didn’t have anywhere else to put it)

Don’t use a .NET version that’s too new (.NET 4.0 is the highest slc’s Wineskin will support)