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Is this the end of CM on Mac? // Apple moving to ARM


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In the long run, it would be very likely that future Macs may not be able to run CM. Apple had previously announced dropping support for OpenGL (which hasn't happened quite yet) in favor of the Metal graphical API. Despite 'Rosetta2' and other features to smooth the transition, it would seem a bit unlikely that CM would run properly on ARM-based Macs (if my experience with every major Mac transition in the past holds). The move to ARM-based Macs may truly signal the end for OpenGL support (though I'm not sure what their Linux support may utilize) since iOS is supporting Metal now too.

There's the possibility that future CM engines MIGHT support future Macs, but that is a straight up guess and will depend on the development tools available and how much extra work it will be to support a significantly different platform. Until those ARM-based Macs are actually released and Apple has fully developed all of the tools and software it will utilize to help with the transition it will be hard to tell if CM will work. The old engines (CM2) probably will never work if Apple's past attempts at supporting previous platform software is any indication (moving from Motorola 68xx0 to PowerPC and OS9 to OS X, etc.). Apple has been pretty pitiful in supporting MacOS game developers with a long term stable platform.

It may take awhile for Apple to fully transition to ARM-based Macs. There are still a lot of Intel-based Macs around and I expect the ARM-based Macs to have pitiful performance for a few generations in comparison. ARM-based CPUs use less power for a reason - they have much less circuitry, cache, and lower clock speeds, etc. In order to match performance of current desktop CPUs they would have to have A LOT more cores, which doesn't really work for many programs. Multiple cores/threads help with some work loads, but not all, especially many single user applications. Apple's real push here is to bring their software development under one umbrella of iOS and ARM-based code. A majority of personal computers sales now consist of laptops, so the ARM-based CPUs help a little in that regard with potentially longer battery life (and a significant cost - the CPU - almost under direct control/benefit of Apple).

Edited by Schrullenhaft
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Sounds more like its closer to the end of Apple as a home computer manufacturer.  Apple's been bored with making home computers for quite awhile, more focused on its iphones and such. Each successive imac 'innovation' in recent years has been nothing but an annoyance to the end-user.

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13 hours ago, DougPhresh said:

I've loved playing CM on Mac, but now that Shadow exists and I can stream a gaming PC through my Mac, I'm less worried about Apple's strange design decisions and more worried about convincing my SO that I should repurchase all the CM titles and modules. 

The CM licences are not restricted to one operating system these days.

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  • 2 weeks later...
  1. Of course, it will depend on how much Battlefront wants to work on it.
  2. If the CM2 code is halfway decent, it should mostly be a relatively simple re-compile and build.  
  3. Apple is supplying lots of developer tools to help with the recompile.
  4. As others said, there will be an X86 (i.e. Intel) emulator to run older intel based apps.
  5. You don't plan to upgrade your Mac anytime soon, anyway 8-)

lee

 

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