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M4 Macs can't virtualise older macOS

(eclecticlight.co)
176 points Brajeshwar | 8 comments | 16 Nov 24 16:12 UTC | HN request time: 0.635s | source | bottom
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Terretta ◴[16 Nov 24 20:01 UTC] No.42158813[source]▶
Commenters lament that Rosetta will go away before users are ready.

In my opinion, Rosetta should be more heavily gated* to push everyone from Adobe to Steam to build for aarch64. Countless "Apple Silicon native" claiming tools require Rosetta under the hood for dependencies or even (bless their hearts) only their installer.

* Like right-click to open packages or install not-from app store, except Rosetta dialog should note that once it's installed any other old software not made for this system will run without warning. Turns out avoiding Rosetta is a great way to ensure not just apps but your CLI tools are all up to date... Alternatively, make Rosetta sandboxed with apps, and/or let it be turned off again more reasonably than the safe-mode surgery required now.

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1. rtpg ◴[16 Nov 24 21:15 UTC] No.42159409[source]▶
The scuttlebutt is that Steam is not going to get ported, and Valve has given up on Apple since the 32 bit drop in general and the Metal/Vulkan mess.

I have seen a huge downtick in games with Mac releases too… even for stuff where it seems like it would be possible with an extra platform export.

Apple seems to care about gaming for about 15 minutes every year, and one day they will figure out it can work on their stuff if they’re willing to accept that their platform will be nobody’s priority.

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2. grishka ◴[16 Nov 24 22:16 UTC] No.42159861[source]▶
> the Metal/Vulkan mess

But what about MoltenVK?

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3. talldayo ◴[16 Nov 24 22:24 UTC] No.42159916[source]▶
What about Game Porting Toolkit? To be honest I feel like that's resulted in fewer native ports and more Mac players enjoying the x86 library that would never be ported natively.
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4. wtallis ◴[16 Nov 24 22:35 UTC] No.42160000[source]▶
Going from DirectX to Vulkan to Metal is simply too many translation layers to work well. You're almost always going to end up with an annoying bottleneck and poor hardware utilization. MoltenVK alone might be fine if Vulkan was more widely supported by shipping games.

I think it's more plausible that Valve decides to make a Proton for Mac using the D3D to Metal translation layer from Apple's Game Porting Toolkit—but that would be going against Apple's intended purpose for the toolkit.

5. rtpg ◴[17 Nov 24 00:24 UTC] No.42160843[source]▶
I don't know, this is just stuff I heard, but I think some of it is Valve just being _annoyed_. Like Apple made this choice despite reaching a point where the highest end graphics card they ship is equivalent to a high-end... laptop graphics card! You shouldn't be in charge of a thing if you're not going to cover a wide spectrum.

At least with USB-C Apple "donated" their designs.

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6. cassianoleal ◴[17 Nov 24 00:52 UTC] No.42160996{3}[source]▶
I don't see how. The performance of Game Porting Toolkit is in my experience very poor.

It's ok for older games but those would be very unlikely to receive a native port anyway, and for anything new GPT just sucks...

7. grishka ◴[17 Nov 24 12:06 UTC] No.42163738{3}[source]▶
> At least with USB-C Apple "donated" their designs.

What do you mean? I've always thought that it was designed jointly by the same standards committee as the previous iterations. The first USB-C device I know about and have used was the Nexus 6P. This was early enough in the standard's life that no one had any USB-C cables (or had any idea that it's a thing) so I had to carry my own one at all times in case I wanted to charge my phone. Apple started putting USB-C ports into MacBooks a year or so later, iirc.

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8. rtpg ◴[18 Nov 24 00:11 UTC] No.42168521{4}[source]▶
My understanding of the narrative was that Apple showed up with a lot of stuff regarding USB-C at the outset, even if they weren't the first person with it on their device.

This was just stuff I heard though. Vaguely, many years ago.