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How can you run old 32-bit, directx 9 games on apple silicon? Is there any solution that is flawless? One of the things that stops me from buying a modern Mac.

I imagine a virtual machine would be able to handle it just fine. Try VirtualBox

I think this should cover it.

https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk

That won’t fix the fact that the macOS kernel can’t run 32-bit binaries.

Unless you know something I don't, VirtualBox isn't qemu's CPU emulation - it's only virtualization for the current CPU. So, great if you want an alternative to Virtualization.framework but it's not going to run Windows 7 on Apple Silicon

And, even if it did run effectively under Rosetta, its management interface won't even let you select a non-arm64 guest: https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/topics/Introduction.html#h...

It's possible to run 32-bit Windows binaries with Rosetta 2 and WINE, but I don't know if there is any good DirectX 9 to Metal wrapper yet. Probably DXMT will implement it in the future: https://github.com/3Shain/dxmt

I believe CrossOver now has full support for 32-bit games.

I have heard of Rosetta not implementing the entire instruction set, and games being one of the most affected kinds of software, most of them crashing due to illegal instructions.

Rosetta actually supports 32bit code just fine.

DXVK does not run on Mac OS. There's a modified version based on an ancient release of DXVK that kinda works on MoltenVK but the D3D9 side never worked.

The D3D9 implementation in DXVK uses a Vulkan binding model trick to improve performance that MoltenVK can't handle.

Besides that, DXVK simply requires modern Vulkan features that MoltenVK doesn't support.