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Comment by ratww | Hacker News Reader

> This move destroys the reputation of Mac as a game platform, compared to Windows which can run decades old games fine.

But this has happened before. Pretty much every pre-2007 Mac game stopped working in 2012 after they removed Rosetta, their PPC emulator.

And 64-bit Intel has been available since Leopard, released in 2007. So that leaves a tiny window of 32-bit only releases.

On the other hand, the removal of OpenGL, if/when that ever happens, might have worse consequences.

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And it’s happened on the Windows side, too.

You can’t just run transport tycoon, rollercoaster tycoon, or xcom without any sort of modification on Windows 10. You’re either using an open source drop-in game engine or a packaged DOSBox setup from Steam. Or in the case of Rollercoaster Tycoon, a rewritten game (RTC Classic).

Windows 10 doesn’t run 16-bit applications, and Windows 10 doesn’t work nicely with a large amount of Windows XP era software.

Windows 10 still supports 16 bit applications if you run 32 bit windows.

The important difference is that Windows supported 16-bit for well over a decade after moving to 32-bit Windows. Well after how long the game developers intended for their games to stay relevant.

The fact that I can still run Age of Empires 2 on Windows 10, from 20 years ago, is amazing compared to the backwards compatibility track records of most software.

If only we all got more than ten years to port our stuff forward.

The first 64-bit Macs came out 16 years ago. The first 64-bit Intel Macs came out 13 years ago. The 32-bit to 64-bit transition on the Mac has not been an abrupt one.

I think we're looking at this the wrong way.

The reason Microsoft killed 16 bit support (In 64 bit editions of Windows) is that very few people were actually running 16 bit apps at that point. Where Microsoft made a decision based on what their users were actually doing, Apple has a made a decision based on what it wants their users to be doing.

The amount of time isn't really relevant. If lots of your users rely on 32 bit software, you should put in the effort to make them work. Apple products are expensive, and I think it's reasonable to expect this in return.

The true reason is that intel didn't support coexistence of Virtual 8086 mode with 64-bit mode. So adding 16 bit app support would require loads of work to get it working as part of a 64 bit OS.

Regular protected mode code has built in support that allows easily running 16 bit apps, so maintaining compatibility was a no-brainer. The moment the trade-off changed, Microsoft decided to drop support for 16 bit apps.

Personally, I don't mind that very much, because dosbox is a great product that bridges the gap perfectly.

Really, all they'd have to do is drop a v86 emulator into NTVDM. There actually exist a handful of projects attempting to bring emulated 16-bit support to 64-bit Windows, including one that's based on that leaked Windows source code (which apparently had a copy of the CPU emulator they used on other platforms back when there were actually non-Intel builds of Windows).

Give OpenRCT2 a try.

16 bit is an order of magnitude older than 32 bit though

16-bit applications?? Of course I don't expect Monkey Island 2 released 30 years ago to work on Windows 10, it would be nice but is easy to conclude it wouldn't work without even trying; what is being talked about here are game released few years ago and even just last year for mac.

But at least dropping PowerPC support was predicated on a legit hardware architecture change. And that new architecture actually made porting from PC much easier.

This change, by contrast, feels entirely unnecessary. The amd64 architecture natively supports i386 code. I realize it makes Apple's maintenance burden lower, but, they can deal with that.

We’ve heard rumours for a few years that Apple is considering shipping MacBooks which use the Ax ARM chips that power their phones and iPad pros. Those CPUs have excellent performance per watt, and decent performance overall. If they’re planning on repeating the Rosetta play that they pulled off during the PowerPC -> Intel transition, it might make a lot of sense to deprecate i386 applications first so there is less surface area they need to emulate. The x86 instruction set is way too complicated as it is without having architecture modes to worry about.

Apple has the ability to both support i386 software on x86 machines, and choose to not emulate that software on future ARM machines. If your supposition is correct, Apple is effectively crippling their current products in order to make their future products seem less bad by comparison. That's horrible.

And in the process, Apple is asking developers to rewrite i386 code for an amd64 architecture which they ultimately intend to abandon anyway.

Maybe. Maybe? I doubt they're motivated by malice or laziness, but nobody in this thread can say one way or the other. What I can say with high confidence is that unless we're in the meeting room at Apple we can only speculate based on little to no hard information. It's entirely possible that there are sound engineering reasons behind what they've done.

AMD64 is going to be around for a very long time; any developer that is having difficulty migrating code from i386 has more fundamental problems than Catalina.

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