32-bit d-day for macOS (OS X) apps (what to do about emulators)

[pcamen]

2nd and 3rd on Office 365.  I used to hate buying Office licenses; would buy one and would use it for as long as I could stand before I had to upgrade.  Now, I happily pay the yearly $100 to install office on up to 3 systems and keep it constantly upgrade.  I feel like I am saving money compared to what I used to spend. 

 

[Cory5412]

I get an O365/Biz tenant through my ISP, five installs through the university where I work, and I buy a personal 4year/2computer install ($80 each time) that education also gets, but it's a great deal and I would absolutely buy up to the full version, too.

BTW, my post isn't meant to like, attempt to de-ligitmize concerns about SaaS and The Cloud at all, just to point out that everything we feared Microsoft would do, they haven't, and Adobe ended up doing, often worse or multiple times.

For the price, I've always  thought Adobe should be giving its customers more disk space and to be honest even at a terabyte, I still think that. Especially with some of their new cloud-first and cloud-only products like modern Lightroom and Premiere Rush, where it's clear what they are expecting is for their customers to upload all of their source media into the service and/or long term store their entire media library in the service.

2011 is absolutely an inflection point in computing, and largely from a technical standpoint, I don't think it's bad, but it's clear in most cases it's being done not because it's what's actually good for computer users, but because it's more profitable overall. As mentioned (I don't remember if I saw this here or twitter, but I've been noting this to myself since at least 2015) Adobe has come home with their most profitable quarter ever pretty much every quarter since discontinuing CS6.

The answer to this on line seems pretty much to be that people should be pirating it -- and, well, I don't say anything if you do.

 

[pcamen]

Man, been reading articles about early Catalina users and it sounds like a disaster.  Especially with Mail.app, losing mail and what not.  I've been through that one time before, I forget which upgrade.  Nightmare.  It sounds like it will be a while before I want to upgrade to Catalina anyways. 

 

[jessenator]

I think the last update I immediately jumped on was, surprise, Snow Leopard, because I wanted the real Bootcamp drivers. IMO that was the best release of OS X. From a purely subjective feel standpoint, it's all seemed like bloat, fluff, and forced obsolescence ever since. </rant>

 

[pcamen]

It's true, there are fewer and fewer compelling reasons to upgrade.  I only upgraded my primary MBP to Mojave because the category lists for Books on the Mac and Books in the iPad would not sync.  I read a lot of books so this was really annoying.  It was due to the fact that the Books version on the iPad required Mojave.  I suspect that last few OS updates were for similar device compatibility reasons.  Kinds sucks to be forced for something like that.

 

[BadGoldEagle]

I upgraded my 2016 Macbook to Catalina on day 1 and everything works fine, except the Basilisk II GUI (as @pcamen already pointed out). No Mail.app problems at all. The only thing that bothers me is the lack of Airdrop support for older macs.... I have Mavericks on the machine I'm typing this from and it is isn't recognized anymore. I know there's a way to add it back, but I can't find the article. But it isn't that important, its replacement is currently being manufactured right now. That'll make two Catalina Macs, one Mavericks, one High Sierra and one Mojave (that I won't upgrade because I want to keep itunes on this machine...).

I have to keep using High Sierra on the 5,1 cMP because of the 1080Ti... I would patch it to run Catalina if I had an AMD GPU, and there's no way to know if the 5700'll work on this machine right now.

 

[nglevin]

I'd peg the best time to hop on board Catalina, if you need it, to be around March 2020.

That's a few months after January 2020, when Apple plans to make app notarization mandatory for apps distributed outside the Mac App Store. The original plan for notarization was for it to be another Catalina change planned for launch. It's a new requirement for running existing apps that's supposed to provide Apple an opportunity to run a malware check.

I'm not expecting Apple to change those plans in light of, whatever happened with this year's Apple OS release cycle. However, they've certainly made some surprising moves this year.

Particularly in trying to cram in so many features into every given major release and rapidly patching the problems with little time allowed for QA.

Genuinely curious how they're going to get out of this.

 

[Cory5412]

forced obsolescence ever since.

Devil's advocate here: Apple has been telling us since 2002 that all this stuff was going to go away.

Most of the stuff disappearing today are MacOS 9 to X transition era technologies.

From a purely subjective feel standpoint, it's all seemed like bloat, fluff

My perception on this is our current era of computing starts in 2010 or 2011, basically upon the release of ChromeBooks, Lion, and Windows 8.

I don't have any specific love for 10.6, but after a couple years away from it, it's been starkly noticeable to step back into it on my macpro1,1 and my mac mini 1,1 and 1,2 and make note of just how fast it feels, even though those are largely ca. 2006 stock configs. It's, I think, egregious that Mac OS X relies so heavily on an SSD, and an outright crime that Apple hasn't standardized its entire lineup to include boot SSDs by default. (There are still iMacs with mechanical hard disks in them.)

been reading articles about early Catalina users and it sounds like a disaster.

bug-wise, It's no different than any other time Apple has released an OS. The major difference is that a couple really long-standing bandaids have been taken away, and some new security measures have been added.

Waiting at least a couple weeks on productivity systems isn't usually a bad idea. (Except for that one year, on the 10.10/10.11 cusp, when Apple wontfix'd a critical security vulnerability in still-current 10.10 and told everybody to upgrade to the 10.11 beta to get the fix for that issue. I don't remember if that fix ever got backported to still-getting-patches 10.10, 10.9, and (at the time of the vulnerability) 10.8 systems.

Genuinely curious how they're going to get out of this.

Same. I'm surprised Apple moved so hard on yearly release cycles, especially after what happened with 10.5 and that year's version of iOS.

I'll be honest, I'm kind of hoping they ease off on the yearly cycle for a little bit, especially if it gets us a couple years of patches on High Sierra and Mohave, each of which people have reason to hold onto for a little bit at the moment.

 

[CC_333]

I have to keep using High Sierra on the 5,1 cMP because of the 1080Ti... I would patch it to run Catalina if I had an AMD GPU, and there's no way to know if the 5700'll work on this machine right now.

The MacPro5,1 can run Catalina?!

I know it can run Mojave with a GPU upgrade. What did Catalina do differently? Require instructions not present in that generation of CPU or something?

c

 

[jeremywork]

I think unofficially the reason they decided it won't natively accept Catalina is that Intel considers Westmere-EP EOL and didn't patch the latest round of discovered microcode vulnerabilities. While the chance these will be exploited is remote, I can understand why Apple wouldn't officially "recommend" their continued use going forward. All of their other machines are still supported back to 2012, and I think the 5,1 would otherwise be. I'm also in the Nvidia boat, so can't even worry about 10.15 if I can't use 10.14...

 

[CC_333]

I see. Well, ever since Spectre and Meltdown were discovered back in January 2018, virtually ALL computers (Mac and PC alike) have been deemed unsafe, and none manufactured before 2015 or 2016, to my knowledge, have been effectively patched, so cutting the 5,1 and keeping all these other equally dangerous machines around seems kind of strange to me. Maybe in the next release, 2016 will become the cutoff point? Much as I hate the thought, it would be a more reasonable place to start from a security standpoint.

c

 

[Cory5412]

I think unofficially the reason they decided it won't natively accept Catalina is that Intel considers Westmere-EP EOL and didn't patch the latest round of discovered microcode vulnerabilities.

It was my understanding that Catalina is using some of the AVX or AVX2 extensions, which the 5,1's Westmere-EP CPUs do not have, but, say, Sandy Bridge M and S CPUs found in some of the 2011 Macs that can unofficially run it do have.

For Apple's part, the reason the cutoff is at Ivy Bridge is because the HD3000 (and the attendant Radeons) in the Sandy Bridge Macs do not have drivers and capability for the Metal API, and Mojave and forward ostensibly require that.

Mojave and Catalina can ostensibly be made to run on many of these machines using patchers, but ultimately the future for that hardware is either retirement or Windows/Linux.

That said: It does look like the Catalina patcher allows running on a bunch of Macs that don't have AVX: http://dosdude1.com/catalina/ 

 

[olePigeon]

Anyone know if Catalina will install on a Mac Pro 5,1 with a supported video card without patching the installer?  I think I read that the Betas installed fine, but Apple officially nixed the 5,1 even if you have a supported video card.

 

[uyjulian]

Anyone know if Catalina will install on a Mac Pro 5,1 with a supported video card without patching the installer?  I think I read that the Betas installed fine, but Apple officially nixed the 5,1 even if you have a supported video card.

No; it will only work with patcher.

 

[olePigeon]

Lame.

 

[CC_333]

Well, the 5,1 has been on borrowed time for awhile now anyway. I guess since the 2019 Mac Pro is out now, Apple sees no reason to continue supporting a 7+ year old machine (architecturally, it's actually more like 10-11 years old; either way, it's kinda amazing they supported it for as long as they have).

c

 

[BadGoldEagle]

The MacPro5,1 can run Catalina?!

Cory already replied to this one.

Mine's still got the High Sierra BootROM, I haven't tried updating it because I can't install Mojave and I'm not using NVMe SSDs anyway. The RX5700 looks like a great card to replace the 1080Ti with, which I have to UNDERclock in order for it to work properly (otherwise, I get hard shutdowns), plus it seems I can still earn money by doing the swap (somehow the 1080Ti still demands a premium, and is more expensive on the second hand market than a brand new 5700.)

Problem is, the RX5700 requires Catalina... So I can't use it under 10.13... And the 1080Ti can't be used to update to 10.15... I'm kinda stuck. But problem requires its own thread so I'll stop right here. BTW, we should add an Intel subforum. 2006 Macs are certainly vintage now and starting to become collectible. And 32 bit apps are now obsolete.

 

[pcamen]

Looks like Ray Arachelian is making LisaEm 64 bit, so that is one less emulator to worry about.

https://lisalist2.com/index.php/board,1.0.html

 

[BadGoldEagle]

I recently bought a 16" MBP and since it comes with Catalina, I had to start over with all of the Apple emulators.

Here's a sit rep (as of December 7th):

- vMac: OK

The custom variations service is no longer free (you have to donate $10 or more per year to have access to it). If you need a specific Catalina build, shoot me a PM and I'll compile it for you. 

The only caveat is that I have to run it in low res mode (which only affects the title bar, not the actual screen). I don't know why it does that so I've contacted Paul C. Pratt about it. Will probably come up with a solution soon.

- Basilisk II: OK

I forgot how picky Basilisk is with ROM files. On Catalina it simply wouldn't launch. After a few tries I got it working. 

The GUI still hasn't been updated, and since the config file is hidden, it's not easy to change parameters. I created a dummy macOS app that opens the config file when you run it. It's here if you want it.

Also, it seems to be somewhat poorly optimized for modern machines, as my i9 is getting really hot while running it (90+ C). Works ok on my i7 10.9 MBP.

- Sheepshaver: OK

Nothing to report

- GSplus: OK

I had GSport on my previous Mac and GSplus is basically the same thing except it works on Catalina. The .txt config file didn't show up for me, only the hidden .gsp one. So, just like Basilisk I created a dummy app, available here if you want it.

- Virtual II: OK

Nothing to report

- ADT Pro: OK for 2.0.2 or later?

Oddly enough 2.0.3 doesn't want to work on my machine. But 2.0.2 works fine if you manage to install Java SE 6, which unless you hack the installer, can't be installed on Catalina. Here's how to hack it.

- PReVIOUS (NeXT): OK

Nothing to report

- LisaEM: Somehow OK

1.2.7 is still in its alpha phase. The power button doesn't work and the Lisa is REALLY SLOW. Looking forward to the final version, but it's looking promising. 

- SaraOSX (Apple III): NOPE

Current version dates back to 2008 and is a Carbon app, so NOT compatible. Developper is still active so I might just contact them to see if they're interested in re-writing for 64 bit macOS. Source code is not available. MAME is apparently a good alternative, but I haven't been able to get it to work yet.

If you know of any other Apple-related emulator, let me know!

I wish PearPC had a Mac port! To emulate early MacOS machines, I have a 10.4.7 Server VM on VirtualBox. Rosetta is used to run PPC Apps, but it's not optimal. 

 

[pcamen]

Thanks @BadGoldEagle.  I just received my new MBP yesterday so I am about to start on this.