Store indicator for intel vs Apple Silicon/64-bit?

[knightscape]

Looking to buy some games, not sure if I can run them on my Mac Studio. I know they complain after you try to install them... will they (hopefully) try to stop me from buying them if I can't run them?

[Cathulhu]

No. Steam will not stop you from buying games you can't run on the device you're currently using.

Is Steam supposed to keep you from buying any game just because you're using your mobile phone right now, instead of your beefy gaming rig at home?

Steam can't see or know what devices you have. So you may intent to buy a game you can't run on the device you're using now to use it on a compatible device later.

Steam won't stop you from doing mistakes. It's up to you to make sure you're not making a mistake.

[knightscape]

So then… where do they indicate 32bit, 64bit, Apple silicon for potential purchases?

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

Originally posted by knightscape:

So then… where do they indicate 32bit, 64bit, Apple silicon for potential purchases?

Tons of laziness to be blamed all around even after this...

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/246803850143596547/631525156103389184/Screen_Shot_2019-10-09_at_12.14.32_PM.png

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks#announcements/detail/3632639303428097613

Steam and macOS 10.15 Catalina

And a thread you may want to read as well...

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamClientBeta/discussions/3/3166519278499204165/

Had everything gone as planned, you would have a checkbox to exclude it by now.

[knightscape]

In my library… filtering by OS using the Apple icon, it removes the 32bit apps… but the behaviors are different in the store. Hence my confusion.

[DocInverter]

Steam should scan the binaries in Mac games (with the freely available tools) to know whether they are x86-32, x86-64 or ARM64 and then show that to us users and allow us to filter. It's not rocket science and would allow us to easily see which game runs on which machine.

[knightscape]

Nope... vendors posting their apps should set the flag to show it's able to be run on any modern Mac if they're offering apple software. Onus doesn't have to be on Steam... just the option for the app vendor to toggle the platforms it's available for.

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

Originally posted by knightscape:

Nope... vendors posting their apps should set the flag to show it's able to be run on any modern Mac if they're offering apple software. Onus doesn't have to be on Steam... just the option for the app vendor to toggle the platforms it's available for.

Yeah. The store pages are maintained by the developers/publishers.

It's a simple checkbox too.

[DocInverter]

Originally posted by knightscape:

Nope... vendors posting their apps should set the flag to show it's able to be run on any modern Mac if they're offering apple software. Onus doesn't have to be on Steam... just the option for the app vendor to toggle the platforms it's available for.

That would work. As long as we users get this information and it's reliable I don't care who fills it out. My point was that it is possible to automate the task. Dunno whether that's the best way to do it.

[aiusepsi]

Originally posted by DocInverter:

Steam should scan the binaries in Mac games (with the freely available tools) to know whether they are x86-32, x86-64 or ARM64 and then show that to us users and allow us to filter. It's not rocket science and would allow us to easily see which game runs on which machine.

You don't even need to use a third-party tool of any kind. Extracting this information from Mac executables, which are in Mach-O format, is really easy.

Regular Mach-O files start with the magic number 0xfeedface, the next 32 bits of the file encode the cpu type. The value 7 means x86, and 12 means ARM. That value is OR'd with 0x01000000 if it's 64-bit.

'Fat' Mach-O files (aka 'universal binaries') start with 0xcafebabe, then the number of following entries for what architectures are in the file. The first value in each of those entries is the cpu type, encoded in the same way as before.

Scan all the files for a Mac game for mach-o files (i.e. look for the magic numbers at the start of the files), pull out the supported CPU types for each file, and take the set of architectures available in all the mach-o files and make that the metadata for the architectures the game supports. They can do that from a Linux or Windows backend, no need to involve a Mac in the process. The only possible false negative is if developers accidentally include in the files a mach-o binary which their game never actually uses which doesn't support their full set of architectures.

'Tick a box for 64-bit' is absolutely the worst way they could have handled this, and it makes me very sad. It sucked when they introduced it, as my previous thread linked by cSg|mc-Hotsauce states, and it sucks especially badly now that you probably want to include two different 64-bit architectures in your Mac builds.

Also, this info should be surfaced in the store in a better way. "Doesn't work on Catalina and above" works to warn about 32-bit x86 only games, but does noting to highlight where games have released native Apple Silicon builds, like (off the top of my head) Factorio, Darwinia, or Disco Elysium.

[DocInverter]

Originally posted by aiusepsi:

You don't even need to use a third-party tool of any kind. Extracting this information from Mac executables, which are in Mach-O format, is really easy.

The problem is that Steam doesn't care, and this thread isn't changing their mind. A shame.