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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

> Gutting 32-bit support will kill off a lot of legacy applications.

Nah, they can be emulated. Just as Apple continues to support x86 apps on ARM, and supported PowerPC apps on Intel, and m68k apps on PowerPC.

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There is a huge amount of Windows software that's still 32-bit (or at least, installs into `Program Files (x86)`), so unless Microsoft is going to start handling that kind of emulation natively in their OS (which they may decide to do), it's going to break a huge amount of stuff.

Removing 16-bit and 32-bit OS support, on the other hand, makes perfect sense.

It works both ways. Axing 32-bit support is going to make it impossible to use a large collection of software. On the other hand, supporting legacy architectures, legacy APIs, etc. for decades also makes developers and users lazy. There needs to be some balance.

Yes, it would have to be done at the OS level. I don't see that as a blocker.

>>so unless Microsoft is going to start handling that kind of emulation natively

They already do, and have since the x64 version of XP.

Its called WoW64.

WoW64 just handles DLL loading/memory mapping/kernel interfaces. It doesn’t do binary translation of the user code at all. Windows x86 on Windows ARM does binary translation.

from MSDN or Microsoft Learn (w/e):

"WOW64 is the x86 emulator that allows 32-bit Windows-based applications to run seamlessly on 64-bit Windows"

Sounds like emulation to me.

Thunking is not emulation.

Thunking has been widespread since OS/2 1 in the mid-1980s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Win32s

The original wikipedia article on Thunks has been generalized into uselessness. :-(

wow64 is just windows equivalent of linux /lib32/*

Killing off 32-bit x86 support broke many games on Apple devices.

A friend of mine loved playing a specific game on her Mac that broke, and she was pissed about it for years. She later built a Windows gaming PC.

I'm not saying Apple executed perfectly, I'm saying Apple demonstrates how you can simply and easily emulate older systems at the OS level and that we shouldn't block hardware development on this. If she wants to play an old game there are a ton of options.

Clearly Apple does not demonstrate how you can "simply and easily" emulate older systems, given that they broke a bunch of games that were merely 5-6 years old at the time. They wouldn't have broken compatibility if it was "simple" or "easy".

The people that actually demonstrate this to any extent are Valve, Microsoft and the people working on Fex. Definitely not Apple, and it's definitely not simple, But it's still worth doing.

The fact is that if everyone did what Apple did, she wouldn't be able to play the game on modern PCs any more. I think that is not an acceptable outcome: for archival purposes if nothing else, it is important that every game ever made be playable forever.

Deprecating 32-bit support means that macOS is never going to be a serious gaming platform again. Many games are done and never see updates again. At least Asahi is going to support older games so you can still use the hardware.

You seem to be talking past me. The thing they did implement, they implemented extremely well (x64 translation on ARM). In fact they even went so far as to implement changes to the physical silicon to improve emulation performance (implementing a runtime toggle to enable total store ordering).

They knocked it out of the park. In some cases emulated Intel apps on Apple Silicon run faster than they did natively on Intel Apple hardware. You are criticizing them for not doing what you wanted which was 32-bit emulation. This is not the same thing as recognizing them for the incredibly good 64-bit emulation they achieved.

> Deprecating 32-bit support means that macOS is never going to be a serious gaming platform again.

I don't think it's been a 'serious gaming platform' since, er, ever.

That's not going to change by enabling emulation of a dead platform.

Except Apple doesn't support 32-bit applications on newer versions of macOS regardless of the underlying architecture, they effectively killed gaming on Apple computers when they decided to remove 32-bit support.

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