Let’s not exaggerate again, like ”hundreds of GBs” needed for macOS or having to ”reinstall Steam 7,000 times” in Wine/Crossover. I didn’t ”completely miss” any points. If you were sick of macOS and Macs that’s fine, you made your choice but with every suggested solution you come up with even more weird problems.
Here we’re talking about those few Mac users who still want to play 32-bit games, not people who switched to PC years ago mainly because ”it didn't feel like MY computer, it felt like Apple’s”. The user macfacts claimed that ”Mac is a fail” for 32-bit games today which can be true in their case and for their particular needs but it’s also far from the whole truth because of the solutions I’ve already mentioned.
If you still were a Mac user you didn’t have to spend money to get back features. You could just have kept your Intel Mac Mini for 32-bit games free of charge. You said your iGPU was weak for new games and your drive full so you would have bought a new Mac anyway. Apple still sold iMac with macOS Mojave pre-installed with Radeon Pro 580X/Vega 48 in 2019. You bought a PC but still either way it wouldn’t cost you anything to play 32-bit games on Mac. If you usually had only 20-30GB free space you needed more storage sooner or later even if you had a PC. So it didn’t have much to do with Apple’s ”crummy drives”. You knew what you bought and either had underestimated your needs or your needs had grown over time. A Mac Mini is also a desktop computer. You didn’t have to ”constantly truck an external drive around”. Today you can even buy a 512GB compact flash drive with 400MB/s write speed for $35 for your games.
It’s true that porting old games to 64 bit can meet hurdles because of old middleware but the number of old games being updated to 64 bit in spite of middleware or still being playable free of charge is far greater than you want to admit. PCGamingWiki lists 727 32-bit only games but many of them can run on PlayOnMac or VMware. PlayOnMac lists hundreds of old games and VMW can run DX9-DX11 so even the majority of retro games should work. I myself finished Deus Ex HR in VMW. I can play other games too like Batman Arkham Asylum, The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, Lost planet 3 and Wolfenstein: The New Order and many more in VMW. Then as I mentioned there are hundreds of Mac Source Ports. We have also DOSBox, ScummVM and emulators. All these solutions are free. PCGamingWiki also lists 242 games with both 32-bit and 64-bit ports and many 32-bits games have now only 64-bit ports and even native Apple Silicon ports.
Even that Bink video you mentioned as middleware
got updated to 64-bit macOS (Bink 1-2) already in 2013, six years before Apple dropped its support for 32 bit. They also added ARM64 support in Jan 2021, just 2 months after the first M1 Macs were released. Epic also bought Rad Game Tools and Bink in Jan 2021. Speaking of game engines let’s not forget all the games made with Unreal and Unity. Both engines have had Mac support since the first release, Unreal since 1995 and Unity since 2005. Unity added 64 bit support for Mac already in
version 4.2 in 2013. Unreal added ARM64 support already in 2014/2015 in
version 4.6 before Catalina. With these engines it was easier to convert old 32-bit projects to 64-bit because the developers didn’t have to do all the work. There’s even a
guide to ”How to port Windows, Linux and 32-bits macOS Unity games to run on 64-bits macOS”.
I don’t know where you get ”you still seem to be thinking volume of crap asset flips is better than quality” from. First you say there are thousands of 32-bit games people play but Mac users can’t today but when I list different solutions for playing hundreds, or perhaps even thousands such games you suddenly label those precious games everybody wants to play but can’t as ”crap”? You mentioned Half-life and Quake 3 which both have source ports. The reason I mentioned the number (1,353) of released Mac games 1997-2013 was to show that there weren’t ”thousands” of classic games released for Mac during those 17 years. After that engines like Unity and Unreal already had added support for 64 bit years before Catalina in 2013-2014. So if most of the old games on Steam are ”crap” anyway the amount of good quality games should be even smaller and with all the free solutions for playing the most popular old games the need of those few game enthusiasts should be covered, shouldn’t it? That’s why many old popular quality games were updated to 64 bit by developers like Feral and Aspyr.
I’m not sure what ”cult mentality” has to do with the subject either. So just because people disagree with you they’re part of the Apple cult? Even if everyone agreed with you it wouldn’t change the situation. Isn’t it cult mentality too to think that the developers shouldn’t have to do anything and Apple is the only one who needs to do all the work and has to change its entire SW/HW strategy to fulfill the needs of a fraction of 1.41% of Mac gamers who can’t play a small part of old 32-bit Mac games for free? How many times have you seen actual Mac gamers complain about the subject here on MR? I can only recall a few times during the past years when people asked for help to make things work. All other times the ”complaints” have come from Windows/Linux/Steam Deck gamers.
Another mistake is to compare Apple and macOS directly to Microsoft and Windows. There is more to the story than Apple just being cheap, easily being able to keep 32 bit support and ”poor choices”. I’ve already talked about the very small Mac user base on Steam compared to Windows, the fraction of those users playing 32-bit games and the even smaller portion of 32-bit games that can’t be played with different solutions on Mac. Another reason for Microsoft maintaining 32-bit support is all those major customers and large corporations that pay big license/support money for their old expensive systems they still use. Apple doesn’t have that kind of customer base as ”consumer focused” company. That’s also the reason why they have been able to adopt and implement new tech in their products faster. There are also technical differences between macOS/iOS and Windows that resulted in Apple’s decision.
You could blame iPhone for the lack of 32-bit support. 5S with A7 was the first 64-bit iDevice and iOS 7 the first 64-bit iOS in 2013. To run 32-bit legacy apps iOS had to load a 32-bit subsystem before the app could actually run on the 64-bit OS. That affected the battery, performance and the memory. iOS had already more users than Mac in 2013 and when Apple announced they would drop support for 32 bit on Mac in 2017 iOS had almost 3x larger market share. It wouldn’t make much sense based on the number of users to drop 32 bit support on iOS but keep it on Mac. It was a part of their long-term plan to bring iOS and macOS closer together and use Apple Silicon in Macs 2020, a year after Catalina. Still they gave Mac two more years compared to iOS which dropped its support already in 2017. On the PC side Windows 7 64 bit overtook XP 32 bit on Steam for the first time in 2010. In 2015 only about 12% used Windows 32 bit.
Another reason was Metal. Apple wanted its own modern graphics API and released in 2014 it was 64 bit only, never intended for 32 bit. Many iOS/macOS developers understand and even agree with Apple’s decision. There is an excellent
tech article by Martin Pilkington that explains the technical issues in macOS that lead to Apple’s decision. Here are some quotes:
”There are arguably more important reasons to Apple for dropping 32 bit on the Mac. They don't actually have much to do with 32 bit itself, but more with decisions that were made in 2007 when 64 bit was finalised. When Apple introduced 64 bit with Mac OS X 10.5, they also introduced Objective-C 2.0. Part of this was a new and improved runtime, designed to fix problems with the old runtime. Unfortunately, these fixes were not compatible with existing apps, so they made the decision to only make this runtime available in 64 bit. However, this meant the (now) legacy runtime would have to stick around as long as 32 bit apps existed.”
”One of the problems this new runtime fixed is quite an important one: fragile ivars. The behaviour of the legacy runtime effectively means that Apple can never update their existing objects with new ivars without breaking existing apps. In reality they have found ways around this but they prove very difficult to do, which reduces the time they could spend on new features and bug fixes. Indeed, the difficulty of having to support the legacy runtime has very likely contributed to some APIs on iOS (which has only ever used the new runtime) not making it back to the Mac.”
”While the fragile ivar problem is a big part of the desire to drop 32 bit, it's representative of a bigger issue Apple has been hoping to fix. They have a lot of legacy cruft in their OS. The Carbon APIs have been deprecated for many years, having never been migrated to 64 bit, but they still need to exist for 32 bit apps. Some of those APIs can date back to the original Mac. There are many other APIs that were deprecated with 64 bit in a similar situation with many workarounds in their code to continue supporting them. The problem with these APIs is that as fewer and fewer developers use them, there are fewer and fewer people to notice any bugs, and in particular any potential security flaws. There are also fewer resources inside Apple to invest in maintaining these APIs to fix any such flaws.”
”The potential switch to ARM also plays into this, as none of these older technologies have ever existed on ARM. Now, Apple could have held off on dropping 32 bit until ARM forced their hand,
it would certainly have made it easier for people to understand the reasons. However, it would have meant holding macOS back for even longer.”
”Backwards compatibility ultimately has a cost. It's a cost in maintaining older technologies. It's a cost in slowing down newer technologies. It's a cost in increased surface area for attacks. There is no right answer as to how much you should incur those costs as a developer. Microsoft has gone opted to suck up the costs and provide extensive backwards compatibility, seeing the benefits it brings as more valuable than these costs. Apple takes a more middle ground approach, maintaining backwards compatibility to a point, but eventually always favouring periodically cleaning out dated technology to keep them moving forward.”
”
While it can seem that Apple doesn't care about backwards compatibility at all, they spend a lot of time weighing up the pros and cons before dropping support for anything. It's also interesting in how much effort they do put into backward compatibility given the large sweeping changes they have undergone the past 30 years, even if that compatibility is only ever temporary.”
You seem to rather focus on old problems than new solutions. More than 7 years have passed since WWDC 2017 and although the problem and confusion was for sure bigger back then that’s not the case after all these years with the solutions I’ve mentioned. Yes, there are always games you can’t play for free but at the same time there are few Mac gamers playing those games too. People couldn’t play their PS3 games on PS4 either. Some people think it’s a fail if Mac doesn’t get new games, some think it’s a fail if it doesn’t have old games, some think it shouldn’t even get any games because nobody games on Mac, the market share is too small and not profitable and Macs are expensive, non-upgradable and non-serviceable. Everybody has an opinion but Apple must draw the line somewhere. The question is where? At 10,000 CS players like Valve did or at potentially 2 Mac players who played Deus Ex yesterday?
The real problem people should instead worry about in the gaming world today is that
87% of all classic video games have disappeared from the market. So the question is not whether you can play an old game on Mac today but if you even will be able to play your old Windows games tomorrow.
For those who still feel that the amount of retro PC games is not enough on Mac here are two recent videos about all types of emulators for playing classic console games:
