4 ms·

My 13 year old son can no longer play a large part of our Steam library because many of the games he enjoys are 32-bit only (Geometry Dash, for one) and we've u

My 13 year old son can no longer play a large part of our Steam library because many of the games he enjoys are 32-bit only (Geometry Dash, for one) and we've upgraded to MacOS Catalina. My old copy of Adobe Photoshop CS6 also cannot be installed because the installer is 32-bit, although there's reports if you had it installed before upgrading you can force it to run. I can rollback my son's laptop, but I am on the new 16" MBP which ships with Catalina. Annoyed is putting it mildly.

dehrmann 7y ago
Not sure how this is a response to the comment about MS supporting things forever, other than that all those things probably still work on Windows 10. Office 97 probably still works on Windows 10.
filleduchaos 7y ago
As an aside, you can install both Mojave (or High Sierra) and Catalina on a single laptop with minimal friction.
- LeoPanthera 7y ago
  Not on the 16" MBP, or any Mac which comes delivered with Catalina. You can't downgrade a Mac to a version before whatever it was delivered with.
  - filleduchaos 7y ago
    I said install both, not downgrade. Admittedly I presumed (perhaps wrongly) that most people here know what dual booting is.
    - LeoPanthera 7y ago
      You still can't. You cannot boot a version of macOS earlier than the supplied one, for any particular machine.
      - filleduchaos 7y ago
        Ah - I was of the impression that the 16-inch MBP initially ran Mojave, even though you buy them with Catalina installed. Probably from the crop of rumours last month? In that case yeah, a partition with Linux might be your best bet if you want to use 32-bit apps, unfortunately.
ec109685 7y ago
You can install a VM and run an older copy of the OS on your Mac for games.
- wila 7y ago
  VMs do not have direct access to the physical GPU. Worse even is that the virtual GPUs on macOS are not accelerated. So for a VM your rendering will fall back on software based (CPU based) rendering. Apple does not expose the APIs which are needed to be able to write a GPU accelerated driver for VMs. IOW a VM is no good for playing games when using macOS.
  - rsfinn 7y ago
    You should probably let Parallels [1] know this, so they can stop wasting their time advertising Parallel Desktop’s support for DirectX and OpenGL (via Metal) as a way to play Windows games on the Mac. (Disclaimer: I don’t actually use it for this purpose. And while it may be true that macOS guests can’t use accelerated graphics, someone looking to play older Steam games presumably has access to the Windows versions.) [1] https://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/ https://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/
    - wila 7y ago
      I am talking about macOS guests, you are talking about Windows guests. It is not exactly the same thing. Yes, you can have accelerated virtual graphics adapters for your Windows guests on your macOS host. No, you cannot have accelerated virtual graphics adapters for your macOS guests on your macOS host. It is true that I could have worded that a bit better.

dehrmann 7y ago

Not sure how this is a response to the comment about MS supporting things forever, other than that all those things probably still work on Windows 10. Office 97 probably still works on Windows 10.

filleduchaos 7y ago

As an aside, you can install both Mojave (or High Sierra) and Catalina on a single laptop with minimal friction.

LeoPanthera 7y ago
Not on the 16" MBP, or any Mac which comes delivered with Catalina. You can't downgrade a Mac to a version before whatever it was delivered with.
- filleduchaos 7y ago
  I said install both, not downgrade. Admittedly I presumed (perhaps wrongly) that most people here know what dual booting is.
  - LeoPanthera 7y ago
    You still can't. You cannot boot a version of macOS earlier than the supplied one, for any particular machine.
    - filleduchaos 7y ago
      Ah - I was of the impression that the 16-inch MBP initially ran Mojave, even though you buy them with Catalina installed. Probably from the crop of rumours last month? In that case yeah, a partition with Linux might be your best bet if you want to use 32-bit apps, unfortunately.

ec109685 7y ago

You can install a VM and run an older copy of the OS on your Mac for games.

wila 7y ago
VMs do not have direct access to the physical GPU. Worse even is that the virtual GPUs on macOS are not accelerated. So for a VM your rendering will fall back on software based (CPU based) rendering. Apple does not expose the APIs which are needed to be able to write a GPU accelerated driver for VMs. IOW a VM is no good for playing games when using macOS.
- rsfinn 7y ago
  You should probably let Parallels [1] know this, so they can stop wasting their time advertising Parallel Desktop’s support for DirectX and OpenGL (via Metal) as a way to play Windows games on the Mac. (Disclaimer: I don’t actually use it for this purpose. And while it may be true that macOS guests can’t use accelerated graphics, someone looking to play older Steam games presumably has access to the Windows versions.) [1] https://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/ https://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/
  - wila 7y ago
    I am talking about macOS guests, you are talking about Windows guests. It is not exactly the same thing. Yes, you can have accelerated virtual graphics adapters for your Windows guests on your macOS host. No, you cannot have accelerated virtual graphics adapters for your macOS guests on your macOS host. It is true that I could have worded that a bit better.