best way to run Wintel on Apple Silicon

[Dewdman42]

I need to run a particular windows x86 program on my apple silicon Mac. What is the best way today to run windows10 or 11 on an ARM machine...but must be the intel version of windows...I guess?

Is UTM in emulation mode the best option today? is there some other rosetta combination? Or do people think its better to install arm version of windows with UTM or VMWare virtualization (instead of emulation) and rely on windows on intl to arm emulation layer?

 

[chrfr]

I’d definitely test it in Windows on ARM via Parallels or VMware Fusion (which is free.) You can run Windows without a license key to see if it all works. If it does, this will give you much better performance than trying to run a full emulated x64 Windows environment.

 

[chabig]

Does it really have to run locally? If not, you can get a $150 headless Windows PC from Amazon, run your software there, and remotely control it using VNC.

 

[Dewdman42]

Yea I will probably end up having together some kind of windows server. but that won't help me when I'm on the road with my MBair... The nature of the software is somewhat CPU-hungry, and, I I don't know if it will work on arm version of windows...I will try that tonight to see, but I'm not too hopeful, but yes I did already try running UTM with Wintel and after taking literally hours to complete the win11 install, it was so dog slow doing just about everything, I just stopped before I even got to installing the apps I need to install and threw that idea out the window. It's worth a try to see if the apps in question will run on Windows ARM through Microsoft's emulation. maybe. At least the rest of windows won't be running so slow.

Otherwise, I will probably pickup some kind of small windows machine to put in my utility room just for this, and maybe some file server duties, I was thinking about doing that anyway. I doubt anything for $150 on amazon will be powerful enough, those tend to be i5's and it's not clear to me right now whether that would be enough. might be, might not. There are a lot of used devices along those lines also. The powerful mini servers I see are more like 800 bucks with ram and storage. but anyway, still the point is trying to see if there is a way to do it all on my MacBook so that when I'm away from home I can do what I need to do. Another alternative along those lines might be some kind of super mini PC I can carry in my laptop backup also...but...they also tend to be not quite powerful enough...but The app I need to use actually may not need the cpu, I won't know until I have an i5 to try it on I guess.

for now just trying to see what I can do directly on the MacBook Air, or might upgrade MBP soon.

 

[Dewdman42]

Yea I'm sucked. I installed ARM version of windows and one of the apps I was going to use does not support running on ARM at all, blocks installation of it. Another alternative app, however, installs and appears to work fine! Win11 Arm runs surprising well and fast on this MBAir..kind of surprised how well it runs actually.. Problem solved. The app I'm running is fully intel...so win11 intel emulation is pretty darn good...good enough...yea a bit heavy CPU, but not bad and definitely will be a solution for me.

 

[Rastafabi]

Sounds like you solved it @Dewdman42. That said you might still want to take a look at crossover. It hat a free trial and enables you to run windows applications locally on your Mac without the need to boot windows. While the compatibility is worse, it nowadays runs the majority of (common?) windows applications fine. It relies on (and heavily contributes to) the wine project, which is also used by proton, the translation layer enabling the steam deck to run almost any windows game.

 

[Dewdman42]

I will look into crossover. Sorta doubtful it will work, the app in question relys on some screen scraping, also a taskbar icon, no normal gui. but hey its worth a try.

In case curious I am trying to run wintel version of Audiogridder, with a particular. VST plugin inside called Jamstix, which is also intel binary.

Well anyway it works running on win11arm, virtualized with VMWare fusion. So that's the good news that the win11 intel emulation supports both binaries apparently. Not sure about some of the other features will work on crossover, like the screen scraping for one thing and not sure what crossover does about taskbar items to access a menu to configure it. More concerned about the screen scraping part, but I will give it a try because then I wouldn't need a 30GB window VM laying around for one thing, but also VMWare Fusion does not support folder sharing with win11arm, which is actually kind of an issue too which would be eliminated by crossover approach. its worth a try.

 

[Dewdman42]

yea tried crossover...doubt it will work. The Jamstix installer has some GUI redraw behavior that appears to be incompatible with crossover wine. So I can't even install it. Audiogridder does seem to run, but it only provides a taskbar icon to access its gui on the server side (which is running in crossover). So there is no way to access the menu on the server to configure it through crossover as crossover does not provide any taskbar access that I can find.

But from the client side, it can see the audiogridder server running and can connect to it...so in theory if I could get jamstix installed also, it might actually work, maybe the server default settings would all be good enough or maybe there is a way to change a text file somewhere for those, but its a moot point if jamstix can't be installed on crossover due to basic window redrawing that crossover apparently does not handle...the same installer works fine on windows 11 under VMwareFusion.

Main downside of VMWare is yea, it's running all of windows, which is probably more overhead, but also it needs something like 30GB of disk space for a program that normally would be under 1GB. Trying to find out if there is a way to manually install jamstix to avoid using their problematic installer, but so far I don't think there is a way to do that properly.

Years ago I ran Jamstix on crossover wine, an older version of it..worked fine. I was hopeful for a minute this might work, but anyway the developer of Jamstix is MIA so I doubt there is a way to make that work. if I ever find a way I'll update this thread later in case someone else is trying to do this, otherwise...VMWare Fusion seems to be the way. Probably UTM would work fine too I may try that soon and will try Win11Tiny or something to try to get the size of the final VM smaller.