These days Origin wants to upgrade to the EA App, which crashes on launch on my M1 MacBook Pro. I was successful using this recipe with the following changes. This is based on this post on Steam Community. It's much more illustrative than this post, so maybe take a look at it as well.
- When installing the recipe, download and use an old version of Origin Full (OriginSetup-10.5.119.52718.exe) from this 3rd party website instead of downloading from EA
- During installation, uncheck the settings related to updating. I only kept the shortcut settings.
- Instead of logging in, I closed Origin and added the following elements to C:\ProgramData\Origin\local.xml:
<Setting value="true" key="MigrationDisabled" type="1"/> <Setting key="UpdateURL" value="EA.nope/" type="10"/> <Setting key="AutoPatchGlobal" value="false" type="1"/> <Setting key="AutoUpdate" value="false" type="1"/> - I then launched Origin and logged in and was pleased when it didn't try to push an update on me.
The guide from Steam Community suggested disabling the Origin Helper Service and Origin In-game settings within Origin, which I did as well.
I had enabled DXVK in my old Origin bottle, but enabling it in the new one causes Origin to crash on startup, so I've left it turned off for now.
Tangentially related to Origin itself, I then closed Origin and moved my SimCity game and data over by searching in Finder for files with "SimCity" in the name on the old bottle's C drive and moving them over to the new bottle's C drive. I started Origin up and it seemed to be aware of SimCity, but needed me to click its tile in the Recent Games list to install it. The install process was very fast and it appeared to mostly wire it up and add program shortcuts. SimCity launched fine the first time, but didn't seem to be aware of my game data. macOS prompted for access to my Documents folder (where the saved games are stored) during this first SimCity startup, which I granted. I then restarted SimCity and it found my save games and it seems to run well enough.