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Comment by aaomidi | Hacker News Reader

Games. So many games.

Also, x86 containers.

Then again games didn't stop Apple from dropping x86-32 support, which nuked half of the Mac Steam library. It wouldn't be out of character for them to drop x86-64 support and nuke the rest which haven't been updated to native ARM.

For games on intel macs they had fallback of BootCamp so combined with not really caring about games outside of random bursts like support for Unity, they were fine telling people to run windows. (ironically, the only Mac I owned ran faster under windows than under macOS...)

Or OpenGL support

OpenGL was deprecated, not removed from macOS.

But Apple has never implemented the final specification of OpenGL.

So even if they have kept the old OpenGL version that they had, many newer OpenGL-based applications cannot run on MacOS.

Since OpenGL is no longer evolving, it would not have been a great effort to bring the OpenGL support to the last version, and only then freeze it.

Developers had something like 15 years of warning before x86-32 was dropped, which was enough for everyone except Carbon apps and games.

Btw, Rosetta 2 actually supports x86-32. Which means you can run 32-bit Windows binaries through WINE, just not Mac 32-bit binaries.

The problem with games is most of them are completed projects and no longer actively worked on, unlike software which is a never ending development on a single project.

So if you kill support for an old game, it will probably never be updated since it's no longer commercially relevant. Publishers are probably almost happy when old games get broken since they can sell you newer ones easier.

Re games, I've tried running Black Mesa recently 'directly' using Crossover on an M2 Max running Sequoia and the GPTK2 beta libraries; vs running it in a Win11 VM in VMware fusion 13. Performance of the latter is 2-3x better (70-120fps). I'll be playing old Steam games inside the win11 VM going forward.

Rosetta supports it at least. You can run Linux 32-bit games!

VSTs. Just as people use vintage physical synthesizers, old guitars, and recording equipment, people use old software that might not ever be updated.

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