32 Lives compatible with macOS 10.15 Catalina?

32 Lives
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Citing CodeWeavers:

The CPUs in Macs still support the 32-bit-compatibility mode. Catalina does still provide a way for us to run certain specific code in this 32-bit mode in an otherwise 64-bit process. One challenge is to find a way to switch modes back and forth as needed when switching between the two types of code.

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Hey guys,
I know itā€™s frustrating.
So here are few more ā€˜techieā€™ inputs for those of you who are more nerdy :laughing:

Virtualization is possible as Crossover has shown with their latest version.

Letā€™s ignore the fact Apple has announced switching to Apple Silicon which uses ARM instead of Intel (x86) instruction set (thus virtualisation would need to be replaced by translation/emulation which can be slower). Thereā€™s a major difference running ā€˜virtualā€™ Windows apps than macOS apps.

Crossover is based on Wine, which is:

Wine translates Windows API calls into POSIX calls on-the-fly, eliminating the performance and memory penalties of other methods and allowing you to cleanly integrate Windows applications into your desktop.

In plain english, a lot of effort (excluding the more effort by Crossover) was spent re-implementing capabilities of running Windows apps under UNIX based OSes (eg. macOS, Linux).

On macOS, until 10.15, we ran your plug-ins directly but inside a 32bit process.
The benefit of such approach:

  • 32 Lives owners were only dependent on their macOS.
  • Running natively means higher compatibility (eg. even protected software runs well under 32 Lives).

Already, with 32 Lives we worked really hard improving compatibility with some old plug-ins.

In order to support 32bit we now need ā€˜remakeā€™ Appleā€™s removed code.
This pretty much means we need to ā€˜re-inventā€™ Appleā€™s undocumented (or even public) code.
Even if we had this part going, itā€™s pretty much expected to be less compatible with the older plug-ins.

So it might be theoretically possible. but currently, indeed, the complexity might be infinite.

1 Like
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Thanks a lot @tal for your answer!

I agree that Big Sur is yet another huge change to come and it could be a valid strategy to skip the Catalina problem and directly solve the Big Sur. (I personally feel as if, while the move to pure 64-bit had to be made at some point, this second huge technical change in a row, just one year after the first, is unreasonable from Apple.)

Yes, virtualizing a Mac app is different but what do you think about this parallel approach that circumvents the issue about the removed 32bit macOS code: since most older Mac audio plugins exist as Windows VST, why not use the existing work made by CodeWeavers, by partnering with them, and virtualize the Windows VST 32-bit versions of the plugins?