[TheTon]

But games are full fledged GUI apps. At a minimum they have a window.

It’s really unclear what it means to support old games but not old apps in general.

I would think the set of APIs used by the set of all existing Intel Mac games probably comes close to everything. Certainly nearly all of AppKit, OpenGL, and Metal 1 and 2, but also media stuff (audio, video), networking stuff, input stuff (IOHID etc).

So then why say only games when the minimum to support the games probably covers a lot of non games too?

I wonder if their plan is to artificially limit who can use the Intel slices of the system frameworks? Like hardcode a list of blessed and tested games? Or (horror) maybe their plan is to only support Rosetta for games that use Win32 — so they’re actually going to be closing the door on old native Mac games and only supporting Wine / Game Porting Toolkit?

[dagmx]

Games use a very small portion of the native frameworks. Most would be covered by Foundation, which they have to keep working for Swift anyway (Foundation is being rewritten in Swift) and just enough to present a window + handle inputs. D3DMetal and the other translation layers remove the need to keep Metal around.

That’s a much smaller target of things to keep running on Intel than the whole shebang that they need to right now to support Rosetta.

[TheTon]

I don’t agree. My point is their collective footprint in terms of the macOS API surface (at least as of 2019 or so) is pretty big. I’m not just speculating here, I work in this area so I have a pretty good idea of what is used.

[rincebrain]

If you'd like to see an interesting parallel, go look at how Microsoft announced supporting DirectX 12 on Windows 7 for a blessed apps list - basically because Blizzard whined hard enough and was a big enough gorilla to demand it.

[TheTon]

That's one implementation, yeah, just have a list somewhere of approved software and make an artificial limitation. But their announcement is so vague, it's hard to say.

And then the next question is why? It's not like they've ever promised much compatibility for old software on new macOS. Why not let it be just best effort, if it runs it runs?