steven36 Posted November 24, 2020 Share Posted November 24, 2020 Recently I was tasked with making some videos of running CrossOver on the new Apple M1 (Apple Silicon) MacBook. What is new and fascinating about this new toy is that it is the 3rd time Apple has switched to a new CPU architecture. A little history lesson for you. Originally back in the 80's the Macintosh used a Motorola 68000 chip. They chugged happily along on these until 1994 when Apple wanted to make the jump to the IBM PowerPC chip. This chip was interesting because it was the first mainstream RISC based CPU. It was also during this timeframe that the largest macOS release X came out. macOS X was largely based on the NeXT core that Steve Jobs and Co. invented while he was away from Apple doing his own thing. Then in 2006 Apple did the what many thought impossible and switched again to the Intel X86 chip. At this time CrossOver was also first released for the Mac. Each time Apple made a switch, they also included an emulation layer so old software would still work. Then during the Intel switch, it was named Rosetta. Now here we are in 2020 and Apple is at it again. This time for the first time, they are making their own chips. Granted, they are based on the established Arm core. Apple has put plenty of their own special sauce into the mixture. Once again, we have an emulation layer included: Rosetta 2. This is how CrossOver is still able to work. Since Wine requires X86 instructions to be able to translate the Windows software over. Now we come to my videos. In Jeremy White's blog post, I ran Team Fortress 2. This was not the best choice as it even on native Mac and Linux it does not run very well. There are legacy Wine bugs that prevent it from reaching the frame rate you would get on Windows. However, it at least ran and did show that CrossOver was able to work on the new M1. My new video, which you can watch right here: In this video I ran 3 different Windows games. Rocket League, Dead Cells, and Untitled Goose Game. The first thing I noticed is that since these 3 games work best with a controller, in Rosetta 2 controllers do not work. This seems to be a bug in Rosetta 2 itself, since I was able to verify that by installing RetroArch and trying to get controllers to work, no joy there I'm afraid. I posted these to my own LaXDragon channel. Free free to like and subscribe to it. I'll be posting more videos in the near future as long as they don't interfere with my other duties too much. 😎 About Jeremy Newman Newman has been the Systems Administrator and Webmaster for CodeWeavers since 2000. He is a Swiss Army Knife of I.T and keeps the hamsters running in all of our Servers. Source Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zanderthunder Posted November 24, 2020 Share Posted November 24, 2020 It seems another person did testing with other games as well, but some of them suffered with low FPS count. And some also have other issues as well. More are explained on this Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/jw3e1c/game_benchmarks_for_m1_mac_mini_with_8gb_ram/ Also, Steam can only work well if GPU Acceleration and Smooth Scrolling are disabled. https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/jw1mfk/steam_acting_slow_and_laggy_on_m1_mac_disable_gpu/ By the way, World of Warcraft gets native Apple Silicon support, starting with version 9.0.2. So technically can be played without Rosetta 2. https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/mac-support-update-november-16/722775 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
steven36 Posted November 24, 2020 Author Share Posted November 24, 2020 1 hour ago, zanderthunder said: By the way, World of Warcraft gets native Apple Silicon support, starting with version 9.0.2. So technically can be played without Rosetta 2. it has a bug in it that cause it to flicker . https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/m1-display-flicker-issue-on-m1-macs-internal-and-external-displays/724003/25 You can't get game controllers to work with Rosetta 2 yet ether it has bug in it. Good thing PCs are cheap . Crossover will stop working once Apple ports everything over in a few years and removes Rosetta 2 because Wine require x86 so they no real future in it on MAC OS anymore like it is on Linux were we use it to make Windows games and apps work. I have a cracked version of Crossover on Linux for along time. Also IOS games want play in full screen none of the IOS apps work in full screen on M1 Mac they have to be ported to M1 Mac to work. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zanderthunder Posted November 24, 2020 Share Posted November 24, 2020 2 hours ago, steven36 said: it has a bug in it that cause it to flicker . https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/m1-display-flicker-issue-on-m1-macs-internal-and-external-displays/724003/25 You can't get game controllers to work with Rosetta 2 yet ether it has bug in it. Good thing PCs are cheap . Crossover will stop working once Apple ports everything over in a few years and removes Rosetta 2 because Wine require x86 so they no real future in it on MAC OS anymore like it is on Linux were we use it to make Windows games and apps work. I have a cracked version of Crossover on Linux for along time. Also IOS games want play in full screen none of the IOS apps work in full screen on M1 Mac they have to be ported to M1 Mac to work. no wonder. then it makes Apple Silicon Mac unsuitable for intensive games if the bugs during porting still not fixed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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