[speculate] Will it be possible to play old 32-bit Windows/Linux/Mac games on Apple Silicon?

[mr_roboto]

I thought one could run arm Linux in a vm? If my physical Pentium 4 box can run a game. Can I expect the same game to run inside a vm on top of an i9?

You can run ARM Linux in a VM, but here you run into the issue that box86 requires support for 32-bit ARM (it emulates 32-bit x86 on 32-bit ARM only) while Apple's CPUs are almost certain to only support 64-bit ARM.

 

[Tech198]

Let's imagine someone in the future releases a Windows or Linux x86 emulator that can run 32 bit binaries. Would it be possible to use that environment to run 3d games that are hardware accelerated?

Or will I need to hold on to my old Mac running Mojave (or Windows) to run 32 bit games like Unreal Tournament 2004?

LucasArts have been using ScummVM for ages to play their classic games.

So who knows,, it may be a trend thanks to Apple silicon... (there would needs to be some 64 to 32 bit layer, just like "WOW"emulation on Windows 64 bit systems) and although slow, the closest to that on Apple would proably be Rosetta..

Sadly, that would be just during a transition "to" as Appl doesn't want anyone to to keep using old 32 bit, it ain't gonna stick around. but i wish it would.

Think iOS, how Apple just pulled the 32-bit plug

 

[thunderstruck]

Wine is a good example of a Windows emulation. It emulates the publishes Windows interface. But it does not always work. To be 100% sure you need a copy of Windows and emulate the hardware at a low level.

The good news is that a computer from 2004 is cheap. you can find 16-year-old PCs for free and you should not have to buy one.

"Wine is a good example of a Windows emulation." This is technically incorrect. Wine is actually an acronym for "Wine is not an emulator". What it does is translate calls to the Windows system libraries (.DLL files) into calls to macOS system libraries (and vice versa when the macOS system library function returns back to the wine translation layer). It does not perform 100% exact translation because without the source code to Windows, it's more or less infeasible to get to 100%.

Because Wine does not perform emulation, it cannot be used to game on an ARM mac. Even if x86-to-ARM emulation were to be performed, Big Sur only has 64-bit macOS system libraries so 32-bit translation cannot be done so 32-bit Windows software cannot be made to run and many legacy Windows games are 32-bit programs.

I agree that your best solution is to use a cheap PC for Windows gaming. It's not worth trying to emulate it on ARM - both for technical and performance reasons.

 

[Tech198]

"Wine is a good example of a Windows emulation." This is technically incorrect. Wine is actually an acronym for "Wine is not an emulator". What it does is translate calls to the Windows system libraries (.DLL files) into calls to macOS system libraries (and vice versa when the macOS system library function returns back to the wine translation layer). It does not perform 100% exact translation because without the source code to Windows, it's more or less infeasible to get to 100%.

Because Wine does not perform emulation, it cannot be used to game on an ARM mac. Even if x86-to-ARM emulation were to be performed, Big Sur only has 64-bit macOS system libraries so 32-bit translation cannot be done so 32-bit Windows software cannot be made to run and many legacy Windows games are 32-bit programs.

I agree that your best solution is to use a cheap PC for Windows gaming. It's not worth trying to emulate it on ARM - both for technical and performance reasons.

That too would be good, except WINE doesn't run on Catalina, depute it being 64 bit.. Thanks to that I am changing to Crossover (most like;y WINE needs some 32-bitness the same Adobe does.)

 

[thunderstruck]

That too would be good, except WINE doesn't run on Catalina, depute it being 64 bit.. Thanks to that I am changing to Crossover (most like;y WINE needs some 32-bitness the same Adobe does.)

in fact wine does run on Catalina as long as you only need to run 64-bit apps. It sounds like you need to manually run the wine64 executable to get it to work. The current wine builds are wired up to run the 'wine' executable (32-bit) so you cannot double click the app on Catalina. However, you can run the wine64 executable from a Terminal window so you can then use it to run a 64-bit Windows program.

Wine refusing to open even with 64-bit support

For example, if you have this Wine app installed on your machine, you would open up a Terminal window and enter:

$ <path to>/Wine\ Devel.app/Contents/MacOS/wine64

you would see wine start up (and then exit because no Windows program was specified). To then run your Windows program, for example, setup.exe, you would enter:

$ <path to>/Wine\ Devel.app/Contents/MacOS/wine64 <path to>/setup.exe

You would replace the <path to> parts with the actual path to your Wine app and Windows program.

Now I don't use Catalina so I cannot comment further. I know enough to be able to launch 64-bit programs instead of 32-bit programs and hopefully it's enough to get you started (if you wish to try it). Good luck.