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This is huuge! 32bit Windows apps on M1 Macs. (spoiler: even Witcher 3)?!

B

BarbaricCo

macrumors member
Original poster
May 7, 2012
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Needs Big Sur 11.1 beta

"I can't tell you how cool that is; there is so much emulation going on under the covers. Imagine - a 32-bit Windows Intel binary, running in a 32-to-64 bridge in Wine / CrossOver on top of macOS, on an ARM CPU that is emulating x86 - and it works! This is just so cool."

www.codeweavers.com

Okay, I'm on the bandwagon - Apple Silicon is officially cool | CodeWeavers Blog

By Jeremy White | 🥳See what we got working on Apple Silicon! We fired up CrossOver and installed and ran a wide range of Windows applications.
www.codeweavers.com www.codeweavers.com

===========

Moderator Note:

Also see the discussion in the news thread:

forums.macrumors.com

CrossOver Allows x86 Windows Apps to Run on Apple M1 Macs

Codeweavers posted a blog post and video tonight showing off CrossOver running on an Apple M1 MacBook Air. This video shows Team Fortress 2 running on a new M1 MacBook Air: CrossOver is software (based on Wine Project) that runs Microsoft Windows apps on the Mac by translating Windows APIs...
forums.macrumors.com forums.macrumors.com
 
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BarbaricCo said:
Needs Big Sur 11.1 beta

"I can't tell you how cool that is; there is so much emulation going on under the covers. Imagine - a 32-bit Windows Intel binary, running in a 32-to-64 bridge in Wine / CrossOver on top of macOS, on an ARM CPU that is emulating x86 - and it works! This is just so cool."

www.codeweavers.com

Okay, I'm on the bandwagon - Apple Silicon is officially cool | CodeWeavers Blog

By Jeremy White | 🥳See what we got working on Apple Silicon! We fired up CrossOver and installed and ran a wide range of Windows applications.
www.codeweavers.com www.codeweavers.com
Click to expand...

Ok now that is awesome! Apex Legends here I come.... Haha
 
If Crossover can get 32-bit x86 gaming working at an acceptable speed, there is no excuse for Apple not to come up with an even better solution if they want to. But ideally, they should get x64 working too.
 
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BarbaricCo said:
Needs Big Sur 11.1 beta

"I can't tell you how cool that is; there is so much emulation going on under the covers. Imagine - a 32-bit Windows Intel binary, running in a 32-to-64 bridge in Wine / CrossOver on top of macOS, on an ARM CPU that is emulating x86 - and it works! This is just so cool."

www.codeweavers.com

Okay, I'm on the bandwagon - Apple Silicon is officially cool | CodeWeavers Blog

By Jeremy White | 🥳See what we got working on Apple Silicon! We fired up CrossOver and installed and ran a wide range of Windows applications.
www.codeweavers.com www.codeweavers.com
Click to expand...
Yes, and other Windows apps work, as well, including the one I need.
 
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throAU said:
Wow, I'm amazed that works.

I think that's pretty much the nail in the coffin of this early 2020 machine for me. It's going to the GF :D
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That early 2020 machine needs nailing inside a coffin full of soil from its homeland so it never haunts us again with its plagued design.

Even the folk on MR who have recently been singing it’s praises are ditching it.

If they have a loved one that won’t be completely offended by being given the useless pos, then I suggest they try. Hard to imagine anyone will be making any money back on them.
 
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Fidelity Active Trader Pro is a 32-bit Windows program that Fidelity ships with WINE for macOS. They have a 64-bit version for Catalina but I haven't tried it. At any rate, it might run under this. I wish that Fidelity would just do a proper macOS AS version though.
 
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How about 32 bit *Mac* apps? I have the Oxford English Dictionary Version 4(OED4) DVD. It is 32 bit. Can no longer run on Macs since Catalina. Can I run it under Rosetta?
 
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Crossover is an X86 app right? Which means it will no longer work after Apple abandons Rosetta (which they will eventually do).
Can CodeWeavers make their App "universal"? Because this case is a bit particular, since the app is based on Wine, which revoles around X86 code (Windows).
Porting Crossover to ARM will probably improve performance a bit.
 
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BarbaricCo said:
"I can't tell you how cool that is; there is so much emulation going on under the covers. Imagine - a 32-bit Windows Intel binary, running in a 32-to-64 bridge in Wine / CrossOver on top of macOS, on an ARM CPU that is emulating x86 - and it works! This is just so cool."
Click to expand...
For a Windows game, add some directX to openGL translation + openGL to Metal (although the latter is not confirmed, it's pretty unlikely that the M1 has openGL drivers).
That is, unless crossover does some directX to Metal translation, but I don't think it does.
 
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jeanlain said:
Crossover is an X86 app right? Which means it will no longer work after Apple abandons Rosetta (which they will eventually do).
Can CodeWeavers make their App "universal"? Because this case is a bit particular, since the app is based on Wine, which revoles around X86 code (Windows).
Porting Crossover to ARM will probably improve performance a bit.
Click to expand...

Codeweavers just makes it easier to do a WINE (I think that it makes Wine Bottles). So it should be port-able. But CodeWeavers is a private company, not open source. So they would have to do the port.
 
AFAIK OpenGL is supported on M1. I guess it’s possible Rosetta translates it all under the hood, but I’d be pretty surprised, since otherwise we would have heard about waiting forever for what would have been recompiling lots of shader permutations.
 
torncanvas said:
AFAIK OpenGL is supported on M1. I guess it’s possible Rosetta translates it all under the hood, but I’d be pretty surprised, since otherwise we would have heard about waiting forever for what would have been recompiling lots of shader permutations.
Click to expand...
OpenGL is supported, but some people who are way more knowledgable than me on this topic think that the system translates openGL calls to Metal calls (which would not require shader to be translated, AFAIK). There are pieces of evidence suggesting this has been the case on iDevices since the A11 (openGL ES to Metal). In fact, Apple may have never bothered to develop openGL drivers for their GPUs (before the A11, they were using powerVR GPUs).
This is independent of Rosetta, since you can still have a native ARM app using openGL.
 
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I'm surprised that no developer has come with a solution to make 32 bit apps work on Catalina/big sur.
If a 32-bit Windows app can run, there is no reason why a 32-bit Mac app couldn't. In case of a game like TF2, which has a Mac version, running the 32-bit Mac app should be more performant.
 
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jeanlain said:
Is there a native ARM version of Wine?
Click to expand...

WINE is open source so it could be compiled. The issue, though, is that the windows executable for your application comes from x86 and has to run on the target system so that, at a minimum, would have to be emulated or translated.
 
jeanlain said:
I'm surprised that no developer has come with a solution to make 32 bit apps work on Catalina/big sur.
If a 32-bit Windows app can run, there is no reason why a 32-bit Mac app couldn't. In case of a game like TF2, which has a Mac version, running the 32-bit Mac app should be more performant.
Click to expand...

A simple solution on Catalina would be to run Mojave in Parallels.
 
torncanvas said:
AFAIK OpenGL is supported on M1. I guess it’s possible Rosetta translates it all under the hood, but I’d be pretty surprised, since otherwise we would have heard about waiting forever for what would have been recompiling lots of shader permutations.
Click to expand...

When you use OpenGL, you already have to recompile lots of shader permutations, sometimes when you just change an OpenGL state parameter. That's why OpenGL got deprecated :)

I am 100% sure that OpenGL on Big Sur is implemented as a lightweight Metal wrapper, so OpenGL shaders will be recompiled to Metal using the Khronos toolkit or something similar. The performance overhead would be minimal

jeanlain said:
But macOS in a VM can't use hardware acceleration. Games won't work.
Click to expand...

Of course they would. VM can install "virtual" drivers that call Metal on the host machine. That's how Parallels and co. been offering GPU acceleration for a while.
 
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