Rosetta 2 on Neo

[Purrific]

Wasn't sure what to call this thread. I love playing Pillars of Eternity - it was the first game I got on my Mac way back in 2015, and still a classic today! As it left the Mac App store a while back, and I wanted to be able to play the DLCs, I had re-purchased it a few years ago on GOG. So I have both a Windows version and a Mac version. It played great on my M3 MBP (not surprisingly!) but on my Neo, it would only play for an hour and a half or so, before the battery died.

So I did a little digging around and - although Apple says if your app needs Rosetta 2 there will be a pop up and it will then install Rosetta 2 automatically - when I searched in Terminal, I could see Rosetta 2 was not on my MacBook Neo. So - I installed it - and reran Pillars of Eternity and it works better, the battery - although not as good (obviously!) as my M3 MBP - lasts a lot longer now - I played it for over two hours and lost around 20-30% battery. I will try again another time using Low Power to see if that helps as well.

(Incidentally, the only way I could get it to run at a really nice-looking resolution was by showing all resolutions in a list, then selecting the largest one - which makes everything on screen look tiny. This makes POE look perfect. And it's easy just to select the default display resolution again when I exit the game). [ETA: Pillars of Eternity-related - they recently updated this (11 years after release!) to include a turn-based fighting mode, so I redownloaded it through my GOG account and it is playing perfectly now with no display resolution changes needed!]

I know this is very niche. So feel free to ignore. 😹

TLDR: Although Rosetta 2 supposedly installs automatically if needed, it didn't for me!

 

[benwiggy]

If your app ran without Rosetta, then it already has Apple Silicon code, and doesn't need Rosetta. It's not going to start using Rosetta unless you set the switch in the Get Info window for the app. And Rosetta certainly isn't more efficient than native code.

If your app was definitely Intel only, then you already had Rosetta installed. (How did you "search for Rosetta" in the Terminal?)

So something else happened for the initial battery life, and installing Rosetta was coincidental.

 

[jaysabol]

When I was installing Epson software on my Neo I did get the pop up that I needed Rosetta 2.

 

[Purrific]

If your app ran without Rosetta, then it already has Apple Silicon code, and doesn't need Rosetta. It's not going to start using Rosetta unless you set the switch in the Get Info window for the app. And Rosetta certainly isn't more efficient than native code.

If your app was definitely Intel only, then you already had Rosetta installed. (How did you "search for Rosetta" in the Terminal?)

So something else happened for the initial battery life, and installing Rosetta was coincidental.

I ran this command in Terminal: softwareupdate --install-rosetta. It then asked me to Agree to the license before installing it. I could swear the game runs better. (I thought this was checking for the presence of Rosetta2 prior to install - I can't find the website I used to get this info).

I assumed this was because I had transferred from my old MBP (via Time Machine) to my Neo using Migration Assistant, and I started to think maybe it would not have transfered across any underlying installs such as Rosetta. That was what I had guessed, in any case.

OK - so, I just opened the terminal and searched back through my commands and tried running the same command as yesterday and it also triggered a process to Agree to licensing before installation. So I CMD+Q'ed out of there.

So it looks like it just goes through this process even it is already there. I checked in my Library files etc. and I can see Rosetta files dated yesterday and ones dated from last year, when I must have played this game on my MBP.

It definitely runs better though, so maybe there were some updates in Rosetta since last year.......

I started looking into this because I was looking at Activity Monitor, and I couldn't see any info about Rosetta use. Then I searched in System Report and it listed Intel beside this game, where it should have listed Rosetta. And I just looked again, and it still says Intel. I had read somewhere online that if the game was running through Rosetta, it would say Rosetta in Activity Monitor and System Report rather than Intel - obviously this information was garbage.

TLDR: I overanalyzed all this... and you are right (Pillars of Eternity definitely runs a lot better though).