Arm-Intel-PowerPC Universal Binaries Are Possible

[Bustycat]

All I want is to see xGates coming back...

https://sveinbjorn.org/xgates

https://macintoshgarden.org/games/xgates

 

[Juicy Box]

a curiosity at best.
Really.... Who's still using a PPC Mac? Sure, there's lots of people with old PPC macs stuffed somewhere in a basement under that pile of ZIP drives- but actually using one?

The PPC sub-forum is pretty active on Mac Rumors with many people still using PPC Macs. While it is more rare, there are some people that are still using PPC Macs as their daily drivers.

I for one still use PPC Macs, not nearly as much as my Intel Macs, but I still use them.
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I am a retro gamer, Apples transitions are a pain in the butt. During the transition to intell, I lost AVP2, Diablo 2 etc. Now, they dropped support for 32bit apps, which means most "made for mac games" don't work

Yeah, me too with both games and other apps.

I remember when Apple dropped Rosetta support, many of my old games couldn't work on the new OS, which was fine at first, but once the newer games, such as WoW, dropped support for MacOS versions with Rosetta, that I was forced to choose new game or old ones with my primary boot drive.

Before that was losing games when Classic Environment was dropped.

I guess it would be too much trouble for Apple to continue to support older system architectures for the long-term, especially when they are no longer charging for OS upgrades, but it gets kind of frustrating investing in SW that you know will not be able to be used on newer Macs after some time.

 

[hot-gril]

I am a retro gamer, Apples transitions are a pain in the butt. During the transition to intell, I lost AVP2, Diablo 2 etc. Now, they dropped support for 32bit apps, which means most "made for mac games" don't work, like Black & white 2, Diablo 2 (yet again after they patched it for intel), and all my old Dosbox games running on Boxer won't run anymore. Now we are going to ARM and alot of Steam games probably won't work. I have literally stayed on Mojave because of so many 32 bit apps I am running. It is super annoying!

If anybody can get the Dosbox app Boxer running (or know of an alternative) on the new macs I will be happy. Messaged the developer no luck Why couldn't apple just do a 32-bit translation layer for legacy apps?

Boxer: The DOS game emulator that’s fit for your Mac.

Boxer is the DOS game emulator that’s fit for your Mac. Playing your old games just got easy.

boxerapp.com

I think it's hopeless, I just use a Windows machine or Boot Camp for my occasional games now. Apple doesn't care about Mac games and shows it in many ways. Though OpenEmu is the best and somehow Mac-only.

 

[Vin Aggarwal]

So you can tar 5 binaries to make a "universal binary"... genius!

 

[TheOldChevy]

Yawn. Wake me when they decide to include a 6502 binary in the mix.

What you are asking for is probably an Apple II emulator. Because as all IOs are different and memory size/file systems are different between Apple II (and III and GS) and a Mac, cross compiling has probably limited relevance (I don't know many macOS software that could be executed on 64 kB).

But a good emulator and some well selected binaries would be fun. Re-using Visicalc, UCSD Pascal or LoadRunner... mmmh.

 

[BornAgainMac]

but_why.gif

.jpg.png.svg.tiff

Thanks, now I can see it.

 

[MacBH928]

I would like to use those PPC computers but there is about zero reason except for kicks, would love to see some sort of a browser plugin that dumbs down modern website from their complex javascript and CSS to make them work on older browser. At least you can browse the web with them then.

 

[DailySlow]

Time to pull out my 2004 G4 iBook and get it up and running...

oh wait, the screen crapped out in 2009

Had three - they ran so hot (my 2004 900 mhz !) I would go to a certain guy in SF and buy a used one with dinky hd and little ram, swap in my HD and ram from the burnout one - this went on til I finally got $$ together for a powerbook 5300 and a ricochet radio modem

 

[Crowbot]

My PPC Mini is looking at me longingly. 🤤

 

[Jack Neill]

a curiosity at best.
Really.... Who's still using a PPC Mac? Sure, there's lots of people with old PPC macs stuffed somewhere in a basement under that pile of ZIP drives- but actually using one?

I just put SSD's in my G4 PowerBooks and got setup with a mess of stuff from the Garden. There is an active community of folks still using them, even if they are not the primary Mac.

 

[Wowfunhappy]

I would like to use those PPC computers but there is about zero reason except for kicks, would love to see some sort of a browser plugin that dumbs down modern website from their complex javascript and CSS to make them work on older browser. At least you can browse the web with them then.

You can do something even better—browse the web WITHOUT dumbing it down.

As briefly mentioned in the article, there's a modern PPC-compatible web browser called TenFourFox. It doesn’t quite work with every site, but it comes pretty close.

 

[Spock]

This transition to ARM is really making people nostalgic for the PowerPC days. I think that Apple is going to have more control of the Mac again and not be limited to Intels update cycle or have to compromise designs with Intel engineers. I hope that we see exciting, fun devices again where Apple takes a risk and goes with something other than grey or black aluminum. I want a new machine that’s as fun to look at as it is to use. Like my G4 Cube or my Blue Dalmatian iMac and especially my iMac G4.

 

[ksgant]

Any support for 68030 based Macs? I paid a bunch of money for my Mac SE/30 and now they want me to fricken upgrade again? I gave you a ton of money already! Is this how Apple treats it's customers? I only got it 30 years ago...why can't I put MacOS Big Sur on it?

/s

 

[alexjholland]

'Technically possible' and 'commercially-viable' are two very different things.

 

[grad]

And make a Power9 (10 is coming next year) -based workstation to replace the current Mac Pro.

 

[mike9449]

a curiosity at best.
Really.... Who's still using a PPC Mac? Sure, there's lots of people with old PPC macs stuffed somewhere in a basement under that pile of ZIP drives- but actually using one?

Well, I do. I have older Macs as part of my home security/monitoring system. For instance one PPC MacMini performs a caller ID function because it is the last Mac with an internal modem. Been running for a decade and a half, no reason to swap it out.

 

[ignatius345]

a curiosity at best.
Really.... Who's still using a PPC Mac? Sure, there's lots of people with old PPC macs stuffed somewhere in a basement under that pile of ZIP drives- but actually using one?

I think the question is not "who still runs a PPC Mac?" because clearly quite a few of them are still out there running for various purposes.

The real question is "who has PPC software they want to run on a bleeding edge Mac next year?" I think that subset of people is probably quite a bit smaller.

 

[trusso]

I'm sure the editors will point out that "Arm" is the official name today, but it's generally stylized as "ARM" - it is, after all, an acronym. "ARM" is how it's rendered in nearly all the literature I've read, except here at MacRumors (and it's been bugging me for years). Since both are equally correct, why not use the de facto standard that may prevent the small extra cognitive load required to parse a very common homonym. Editorial guidelines are designed to make writing as clear and unambiguous as possible, so this is a case were slavish devotion to "proper" rendering of a word or name runs counter to that goal.

Perhaps a visual approach will make my point clear.

Arm

ARM

Get it? Got it? Good.

 

[TSE]

This transition to ARM is really making people nostalgic for the PowerPC days. I think that Apple is going to have more control of the Mac again and not be limited to Intels update cycle or have to compromise designs with Intel engineers. I hope that we see exciting, fun devices again where Apple takes a risk and goes with something other than grey or black aluminum. I want a new machine that’s as fun to look at as it is to use. Like my G4 Cube or my Blue Dalmatian iMac and especially my iMac G4.

I hope so too! I really do believe the "Mac" lost some of it's magic when it transitioned into Intel - really didn't bring out any exciting new form factors. Just refinements of existing designs. Really.... is the 16" MacBook Pro that much different from the 15" PowerBook G4? The only one it really took a risk on was the trash can Mac Pro - and because of terrible thermals from Intel (Apple's engineering shares half the blame here though), it bit Apple in the ass and they haven't tried anything exciting since.

Hopefully this brings the fun out of the Mac again.

 

[Zdigital2015]

I need to quickly price my Quicksilver G4 with 128MB GeForce 4Ti, ride this wave and sell it.

 

[ElectricPotato]

Perhaps a visual approach will make my point clear.
...

Where does this fit in?

 

[Sappharad]

Instead you need to build the PPC binary on an old version of Xcode running on an old version of OS X (in a VM or using separate boot disk or partition on an older Mac). That old Xcode will include the old proper libraries and frameworks. Then copy the binary to the current version of Xcode on a current Mac running a current macOS, and lipo your fat binary together, before code-signing or notarization.

There's a problem with this. I ran into it a couple months ago with an app where I was still supporting OS X 10.7.

Apple stopped notarizing apps built against an SDK version older than 10.9 earlier this year. The notary service will reject anything that targets OS versions they abitrarily deemed too old. For the app in question I ended up releasing 2 different builds: One that was code signed and intended for 10.7 to 10.10, and another that was notarized targeting 10.11 and later. I was basically forced to drop 10.7 support going forward, but I had been planning to do it anyway for about a year now since I wanted to switch the "modern" TableView that they added in 10.11 to improve performance.

tl;dr - In simple terms, Apple will not notarize one of these "Super Fat" binaries because the PPC target is going to be against a Mac OS X version that they refuse to notarize. So while it is possible to create a single app bundle that works on PPC, Intel, and ARM, you won't be able run it out of the box on macOS 10.15. You'll always have to make the app unsigned and have users manually allow it to run via one of the 3 methods of doing that. (Terminal command, context menu launch, or System Preferences)

---
Just as an addendum, it wasn't always like this. I could still notarize my app targeting 10.7 last December.

 

[gnasher729]

There are problems with this, and the most difficult one is which OS versions are supported. The last supported version for PowerPC will be MacOS 10.5 or 10.6. The oldest supported version for MacOS Intel will be probably 10.9, and the oldest supported version for MacOS ARM is probably the latest version shipping now.

So you will need code that runs on each of these versions. You will need different compilers, which will need different MacOS versions to run on, so for a developer this will be an absolute pain.

 

[Emanuel Rodriguez]

It’s amazing that things like this are possible. I’m glad that there are some people out there who devote countless hours of their lives to these noble causes.

Nobody devoted anything to this. The mach-o format (the format of executables on macOS) could support far more than just Intel, ARM and PPC. It has actually been used to support multiple types of ARM in the past, particularly for when iOS was making the 64-bit transition (32/64bit ARM in one binary).

 

[justperry]

I'm sure the editors will point out that "Arm" is the official name today, but it's generally stylized as "ARM" - it is, after all, an acronym. "ARM" is how it's rendered in nearly all the literature I've read, except here at MacRumors (and it's been bugging me for years). Since both are equally correct, why not use the de facto standard that may prevent the small extra cognitive load required to parse a very common homonym. Editorial guidelines are designed to make writing as clear and unambiguous as possible, so this is a case were slavish devotion to "proper" rendering of a word or name runs counter to that goal.

Perhaps a visual approach will make my point clear.

Arm
View attachment 933227

ARM
View attachment 933228

Get it? Got it? Good.

arm

Arm in Text