Thoughts on VM/OS-Emu for Apple Silicon

[AnimeFunTv]

So, I've been seriously thinking about finally upgrading my 5,1 MacPro to a Mac Studio.

One of the big deals right now is VM's as I use WinXP, Win7 & MacOS 10.7 to run older apps and games at times.

I know that Parallels & VM Fusion are working on getting more modern OS's to VM but so far it doesn't look hopeful (to me) that they'd spend time to get older OS's to run. Also QEMU/UTM can run in Emulation, they say outright that 3D games won't run properly or not at all.

I'd like to think Parallels & VM Fusion would eventually 'crack the code' so to speak and find a way to allow VM of older OS's, but my magic 8 ball says 'Outlook not so good'.

What do you guys think?

 

[ct2k7]

Parallels can only run Windows For Arm, and VMWare is in preview. Maybe QEMU works? Doesn’t seem reliable.

Outlook not so good.

 

[bobcomer]

So, I've been seriously thinking about finally upgrading my 5,1 MacPro to a Mac Studio.

One of the big deals right now is VM's as I use WinXP, Win7 & MacOS 10.7 to run older apps and games at times.

I know that Parallels & VM Fusion are working on getting more modern OS's to VM but so far it doesn't look hopeful (to me) that they'd spend time to get older OS's to run. Also QEMU/UTM can run in Emulation, they say outright that 3D games won't run properly or not at all.

I'd like to think Parallels & VM Fusion would eventually 'crack the code' so to speak and find a way to allow VM of older OS's, but my magic 8 ball says 'Outlook not so good'.

What do you guys think?

What you said.

 

[GaryGnu]

I'd like to think Parallels & VM Fusion would eventually 'crack the code' so to speak and find a way to allow VM of older OS's, but my magic 8 ball says 'Outlook not so good'.

What do you guys think?

I'm confused. Is the magic 8 ball talking about VM's or mail clients?


I'll show myself out...

 

[chrfr]

I'd like to think Parallels & VM Fusion would eventually 'crack the code' so to speak and find a way to allow VM of older OS's, but my magic 8 ball says 'Outlook not so good'.

VMware has been clear that they have no intention to develop emulation products, so they'll never be providing a way to run Intel OSes on Apple Silicon Macs.

 

[jdb8167]

I know VMWare has said they won’t do x86 emulation. Parallels is likely the same though I’m not aware of an official statement on it.

UTM is based on QEMU which is a general purpose emulation platform for many different CPU architectures. As such, it isn’t particularly optimized for x86. I doubt it is as fast as it could be though I haven’t really investigated deeply.

I think there is clearly a market for a more specialized emulator that could potentially be faster than what is currently available. It might take a new company to get there though.

 

[brosenz]

Would UTM/QEMU be too slow to run Linux?

 

[jdb8167]

Would UTM/QEMU would be too slow to run Linux?

Do you want to run AMD64 Linux or Aarch64 Linux? If the second and you have the correct version of QEMU then it should use the Apple silicon hypervisor and be quite fast. If you are trying to run an AMD64 version it will a lot slower. It might be usable though depending on what you are trying to accomplish.

 

[brosenz]

Do you want to run AMD64 Linux or Aarch64 Linux? If the second and you have the correct version of QEMU then it should use the Apple silicon hypervisor and be quite fast. If you are trying to run an AMD64 version it will a lot slower. It might be usable though depending on what you are trying to accomplish.

Native ARM linux, same architecture as the Apple Silicon

 

[jdb8167]

Native ARM linux, same architecture as the Apple Silicon

I haven’t tried downloading QEMU with Brew recently but the last time I did it didn’t have the ASi Hypervisor patches yet. The latest versions of UTM do have them though so you should find it very usable.

https://mac.getutm.app/

 

[ahurst]

I haven't tried it myself, but it seems like gaming performance with Windows-on-ARM via Parallels is surprisingly good. Coupled with the handy tips and tricks from PCGamingWiki on how to get various older games running smoothly on modern Windows, you might find the lack of proper XP/Win7 emulation is as much of a problem as you think!

 

[orionquest]

I haven't tried it myself, but it seems like gaming performance with Windows-on-ARM via Parallels is surprisingly good. Coupled with the handy tips and tricks from PCGamingWiki on how to get various older games running smoothly on modern Windows, you might find the lack of proper XP/Win7 emulation is as much of a problem as you think!

How can you speak of something if you haven't experienced it yourself.
And do all Windows games work on Windows ARM?

I would think it to be foolish to bother with Windows games in emulation. If you are this interested in gaming just buy a Windows PC or Xbox. ?‍♂️

 

[jdb8167]

How can you speak of something if you haven't experienced it yourself.
And do all Windows games work on Windows ARM?

I would think it to be foolish to bother with Windows games in emulation. If you are this interested in gaming just buy a Windows PC or Xbox. ?‍♂️

It’s not really emulation. It is a virtual machine running Windows 11 on Arm and Windows 11 is translating x86 binaries to Aarch64 binaries. Not as efficient as native but nowhere near as bad as emulation.

 

[ahurst]

How can you speak of something if you haven't experienced it yourself.

When watching endless review videos of the 14” MBP Pro/Max when they came out (before picking up my own), I watched quite a few reviewers test relatively recent (past 2/3 years) games in Parallels at decent settings and getting really good frame rates (sometimes hitting the MBP’s native 120 Hz).

For games from the XP and Windows 7 eras (7-20 years old), they should should run great once installed and configured correctly (for my favorites from that era, a trip to PCGamingWiki is usually necessary to run nice in widescreen and/or on Windows 10).

And do all Windows games work on Windows ARM?

I don’t think DirectX 12 games work yet, and there are bound to be some weird compatibility issues for some specific games, but most older titles should run just fine as they would on x86 Windows 11 (minus the ~20% x86-on-ARM speed penalty). Since parallels offers a free trial, the OP should definitely test their specific titles of interest before they buy to make sure they work okay.

 

[AnimeFunTv]

Looking at other videos and reviews, I'd say more progress will be made on QEMU if they had more resources to implement 3D Acceleration. Their MacOS emu is good, but still lacking. Parallels will pretty much have to start from scratch if it wants to implement older OS's but it will have to be under emulation as it been said before that VM's needs the same architecture as the guest OS's was designed for (x86-64) that being said, I don't think Parallels wants to go that route unless there is a big demand to run older OS's. Emulation will be the only way forward for older OS's.

 

[hxlover904]

Would something like Crossover do what you need?

 

[orionquest]

When watching endless review videos of the 14” MBP Pro/Max when they came out (before picking up my own), I watched quite a few reviewers test relatively recent (past 2/3 years) games in Parallels at decent settings and getting really good frame rates (sometimes hitting the MBP’s native 120 Hz).

For games from the XP and Windows 7 eras (7-20 years old), they should should run great once installed and configured correctly (for my favorites from that era, a trip to PCGamingWiki is usually necessary to run nice in widescreen and/or on Windows 10).

I don’t think DirectX 12 games work yet, and there are bound to be some weird compatibility issues for some specific games, but most older titles should run just fine as they would on x86 Windows 11 (minus the ~20% x86-on-ARM speed penalty). Since parallels offers a free trial, the OP should definitely test their specific titles of interest before they buy to make sure they work okay.

That sounds like a lot of youtube time ??
Care to share any of the reviews which might be worth checking out?

 

[AnimeFunTv]

Would something like Crossover do what you need?

I haven't played around with Crossover for several years as I saw no need to when Parallels matured. I see a bigger need in Crossover for M1 as I don't see Parallels bringing back support for older Windows/MacOS OS's. It would be nice to see Crossover trying to work on a sandbox that would allow older OSX games to work such as OG Halo: combat evolved.