Workaround for 32-bit games on M1 Macs

[TheKizzaMFG]

In case it helps anyone out there with an M1 Mac who wants to play older 32-bit only games, I had success with a Windows 11 VM under Parallels. I was shocked this was possible, nevermind playable, with so many layers of virtualization/emulation!

My attempt was with Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun (2016). It's 32-bit only (not just mislabeled) and won't run at all natively on macOS Monterey. I have ARM Windows 11 running under Parallels and installed Steam, which is an x86 application but can run using Microsoft's x86 emulation on ARM. The Steam client itself runs fine, and honestly, it seems a bit snappier than the native x86 macOS client running with Rosetta emulation. So the final recipe looks like:

M1 Mac -> Parallels VM -> ARM Windows -> Microsoft x86 emulation -> x86 game

The game itself is a perfectly playable experience. On my 16" MBP with an M1 Pro, I get ~40fps at "3840x2160" and ~100fps at "1920x1080". Those numbers are the display resolution reported by Windows 11, and I put them in quotes because everything gets wonky with display scaling enabled in macOS. That's a separate topic related purely to Parallels, but in all cases it was running as a windowed application on the Mac, the size of which will totally depend on your display scaling settings in macOS and Parallels. I assume the game is rendering at whatever resolution Windows says the display is set to, which I believe is a fairly accurate guess based on all the combinations I tried and the fact that I only really saw a change in FPS when the Windows client OS display size changed.

Hope this helps anyone else who is interested in running 32-bit games on M1 Macs! I have no idea how a more GPU hungry game would perform, but if 32-bit games by nature are older and designed for much slower hardware, perhaps all the CPU wizardry going on won't matter.

[NimiaVis]

Thats dope. Good job