Running an old Intel binary on Apple Silicon?

[th0masp]

Hi everyone,

My Trashcan Mac Pro just bit the dust and I'm looking at an urgent replacement, possibly a Mini. Pretty straight forward move - if it weren't for that one application I'd really like to keep that is 32-bits only (abandonware). Is there any way to run that on a M-series Mac with the current OS releases?

The binary is available as 32-bits Windows and (Intel-) Mac builds. Emulation, virtual machine running Mojave or Windows or Wine, ... are there any options at all?

Thanks!

 

[mr_roboto]

Rosetta 2 doesn't permit running 32-bit Intel Mac apps, only 64-bit.

Windows-on-Arm has an x86 emulation layer similar to Rosetta, but does support 32-bit apps, so you can run Arm Windows inside a VM (Parallels or VMWare Fusion), then run the 32-bit Windows binary inside the VM.

Wine might also be an option, skipping the full VM.

 

[th0masp]

Windows-on-Arm has an x86 emulation layer similar to Rosetta, but does support 32-bit apps, so you can run Arm Windows inside a VM (Parallels or VMWare Fusion), then run the 32-bit Windows binary inside the VM.

Oh wow - what's that like for performance though? Not that my app would require a ton and I realize the M4 of the Mini would be running rings around my old Trashcan's Xeon but that solution kinda sounds like a slide show.

When you say Wine (Winebottler or Crossover...?) - would that allow 32 bits x86 binaries without going the Windows Arm route?

 

[mr_roboto]

Performance of an app that doesn't need much should be fine either way. And yes, I'm referring to things like Winebottler or Crossover for the second option. Crossover is a commercially packaged Wine with some extra things; Crossover's employees are probably the #1 current source of work on the open source Wine project. This means that some stuff works best in Crossover, but there's a chance it works fine in plain open-source Wine (which is what Winebottler looks like).

32 bit Intel binaries work in Arm Macintosh Wine, thanks to some interesting work both inside and out of Apple. The inside-Apple work is that Rosetta actually does support 32-bit x86 instructions, even though it can't run 32-bit Mac applications. (The apps require 32-bit Mac system libraries, and Apple hasn't shipped those since macOS Catalina, which cannot run on Apple Silicon Macs.) The outside-Apple work was done by Crossover - they figured out how to take that ability of Rosetta to run 32-bit Intel instructions and apply it to Wine, which IIRC was not simple to pull off. Net result: Wine can run 32- and 64-bit Intel Windows binaries on Arm Macintosh through Rosetta.

 

[Basic75]

If the performance requirements are not too high you could also use UTM/Qemu to emulate a 32bit x86 system and install 32bit Windows and your legacy application. This approach is slower than virtualization, but you can emulate a bunch of different processors.

 

[th0masp]

Thanks for the input guys, very encouraging!

 

[p33t3r]

I'm running Windows XP via UTM for this kind of use case since my 2020 Intel MBP bit the dust. The configuration I need doesn't work on ARM Windows, and anything newer than XP is too slow to be usable, even on an M4. So performance-wise it should be doable. I don't know how feasible it is to run a 32-bit OS X version through emulation, though, but here are some configuration files that might get you started: https://github.com/adespoton/utmconfigs

 

[jackerin]

I'd recommend giving Crossover a try if there is a Windows version available. I had a legacy app that the kids really like (Lego Digital Designer) that doesn't run on AS, but the Windows version ran fine via Crossover.