x86 gaming and running x86 Linux software are the exceptions.
> Starting with macOS 28, Rosetta 2 will be largely discontinued. Apple says that after that point, it “will keep a subset of Rosetta functionality aimed at supporting older unmaintained gaming titles, that rely on Intel-based frameworks.”
What they say is "we will keep a subset of Rosetta functionality aimed at supporting older unmaintained gaming titles, that rely on Intel-based frameworks" which sounds like OS X games. But even if it is all-inclusive "retro" games, that means the 1,000s of contemporary games runnable via Crossover through Steam for Windows are being shut out.
They relented under pressure to continue allowing Linux virtual machines, so hopefully they continue to revisit this decision.
Given that they could have easily get Steam Deck levels of compatibility with Windows games, but didn’t, I think they’re mainly after the App Store margins for ported games. Having an independent marketplace with tons of Mac-compatible games is a nightmare for them.
If I'm not mistaken, to keep native titles running, they need to continue to haul around x86 versions of the majority of the system's libraries and frameworks, in which case there's little reason to not continue supporting Rosetta 2 as a whole since the delta between the two library/framework sets is minimal.
To keep games in WINE/CrossOver/etc working all they need to keep around is the x86 translation layer and maybe the x86 slice of OpenGL. Everything else x86 related can be deleted.
Dosbox has its emulator to run DOS, but afaik dosbox binary that starts up dosbox on Mac uses Rosetta on M-series Macs, and without Rosetta it simply won’t start and emulate DOS.
At least the ARM-based binary of DosBox-X (a variant of DosBox) runs natively and works great for everything I've thrown at it like old Apogee games, etc.
I get why Apple wants to remove it but it genuinely sucks. I can't imagine it costs them a lot to put it into maintenance mode and just support 20 years of macOS games and apps going forward. They want developers to fully move to ARM but older titles or software whose developers have moved on/passed will be lost to the sands of time.
If they choose to discontinue it, it would be nice to have them opensource it so that the community could have a go at maintaining it tbh. Surely that's better than letting it rot (both rosetta and the old software that it runs).
That would be ideal, but given Apple's general hostility towards Open Source, it sounds extremely unlikely. I wonder what it would take to re-implement it. If it's "just software," I suppose there is a chance, not that I'm volunteering :)
Apple really isn't as hostile towards OSS as people think. With that being said, the reason to discontinue Rosetta 2 is to push developers to upgrade their software. Allowing others to continue using Rosetta 2 by way of 3rd party maintainers works against that goal :(
Rosetta 2 is software, but there are design decisions made for the M-series chips that are specifically made to improve the ability of Rosetta to work in a performant way. The main one I'm aware of is the x86-TSO memory-ordering mode - most ARM chips don't support this, but the M-series have it so that Rosetta can toggle it on for x86 emulation.
I'm not sure what the total cost of these are, but it's not zero.
> There are only a handful of different instructions that account for 90% of all operations executed, and, near the top of that list are addition and subtraction. On ARM these can optionally set the four-bit NZCV register, whereas on x86 these always set six flag bits: CF, ZF, SF and OF (which correspond well-enough to NZCV), as well as PF (the parity flag) and AF (the adjust flag).
> Emulating the last two in software is possible (and seems to be supported by Rosetta 2 for Linux), but can be rather expensive. Most software won’t notice if you get these wrong, but some software will. The Apple M1 has an undocumented extension that, when enabled, ensures instructions like ADDS, SUBS and CMP compute PF and AF and store them as bits 26 and 27 of NZCV respectively, providing accurate emulation with no performance penalty.
There's another big one, 4K page support. The MMU can be told to set up a virtual address space with smaller, x86-compatible 4096-byte memory pages instead of the default 16384-byte pages.
This would be very bad for Wine too. I think Wine has some answer to this, since Wine does run on Android, but I think it won’t make the current easy path that is just brew install wine and be done.
x86 gaming and running x86 Linux software are the exceptions.
> Starting with macOS 28, Rosetta 2 will be largely discontinued. Apple says that after that point, it “will keep a subset of Rosetta functionality aimed at supporting older unmaintained gaming titles, that rely on Intel-based frameworks.”
https://9to5mac.com/2026/02/16/macos-26-4-will-notify-users-...
It's the Mac native x86 software that hasn't been updated in most of a decade that would be affected.
> Retro gaming
What they say is "we will keep a subset of Rosetta functionality aimed at supporting older unmaintained gaming titles, that rely on Intel-based frameworks" which sounds like OS X games. But even if it is all-inclusive "retro" games, that means the 1,000s of contemporary games runnable via Crossover through Steam for Windows are being shut out.
They relented under pressure to continue allowing Linux virtual machines, so hopefully they continue to revisit this decision.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/abou...
Given that they could have easily get Steam Deck levels of compatibility with Windows games, but didn’t, I think they’re mainly after the App Store margins for ported games. Having an independent marketplace with tons of Mac-compatible games is a nightmare for them.
Apple is dogmatically anti games, they only spare bare minimum of effort to support videogames as an necessary evil. It's some Jobs' teaching thing.
gaming apps account for approximately 70% of all App Store revenue.
On the iPhone, where they go out of their way to prevent Steam or anyone else eating into that market.
On Mac it's probably closer to 0% of all revenue, and they seem incapable of competing for it.
Of course, I agree. Just saying I think they probably do have to care about the gaming market a whole lot, whether Jobs liked it or not
They tried, but didn't follow through. macOS is corporate abandonware and they don't want to undermine their iOS market with real emulators.
That's an "I'll believe it when I see it working on my machine" matter.
As my sibling post says, it's more likely to work only for some older mac os native games.
I'd expect the exact opposite.
If I'm not mistaken, to keep native titles running, they need to continue to haul around x86 versions of the majority of the system's libraries and frameworks, in which case there's little reason to not continue supporting Rosetta 2 as a whole since the delta between the two library/framework sets is minimal.
To keep games in WINE/CrossOver/etc working all they need to keep around is the x86 translation layer and maybe the x86 slice of OpenGL. Everything else x86 related can be deleted.
Is there an actual reason for it, apart from Apple hurrying devs along?
For the consumer, the benefits of backwards compatibility are obvious, but it’s sad that companies don’t see it as a selling point.
Well, we wouldn’t want anyone using their perfectly functional copy of Photoshop CS6 would we…
Apple has historically always been about pushing devs forwards and dropping support for legacy systems.
Their attitude has been "we built new hardware, we built new software, we have the tools to develop for these new systems, adapt or die".
This Rosetta 2 transition is actually a couple years longer that their first PPC -> Intel transition. There's more time to adapt this go around.
The Apple Silicon dev kit shipped in 2019 and the cutoff date is 2028, so it's a pretty mild form of hurry.
If you want to continue to run older software, do what you would do in Windows 11 and spin up VM with an older version of the OS.
I keep a Windows 2000 VM with no network access around just to occasionally play Heroes of Might and Magic 3.
That’s probably the sensible route… No use being idealistic about these things, public companies aren’t known for their sentimentality after all :)
I thought dosbox had its own x86 emulation layer so it should work fine on any arch?
Dosbox has its emulator to run DOS, but afaik dosbox binary that starts up dosbox on Mac uses Rosetta on M-series Macs, and without Rosetta it simply won’t start and emulate DOS.
At least the ARM-based binary of DosBox-X (a variant of DosBox) runs natively and works great for everything I've thrown at it like old Apogee games, etc.
https://github.com/joncampbell123/dosbox-x
Wow that brings back some memories, but I was playing those games on a 386 running them on any hardware from this century must be absolutely trivial.
Oh yeah for sure. I used to play Commander Keen, Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure, Major Stryker, etc. though it was on a 486 SX 25 MHz back in the day too!
I get why Apple wants to remove it but it genuinely sucks. I can't imagine it costs them a lot to put it into maintenance mode and just support 20 years of macOS games and apps going forward. They want developers to fully move to ARM but older titles or software whose developers have moved on/passed will be lost to the sands of time.
If they choose to discontinue it, it would be nice to have them opensource it so that the community could have a go at maintaining it tbh. Surely that's better than letting it rot (both rosetta and the old software that it runs).
That would be ideal, but given Apple's general hostility towards Open Source, it sounds extremely unlikely. I wonder what it would take to re-implement it. If it's "just software," I suppose there is a chance, not that I'm volunteering :)
Apple really isn't as hostile towards OSS as people think. With that being said, the reason to discontinue Rosetta 2 is to push developers to upgrade their software. Allowing others to continue using Rosetta 2 by way of 3rd party maintainers works against that goal :(
I imagine that the area it takes up on the chip is non-trivial and so it'd cost them a ton to continue to have it.
I thought Rosetta 2 was a purely software layer
Rosetta 2 is software, but there are design decisions made for the M-series chips that are specifically made to improve the ability of Rosetta to work in a performant way. The main one I'm aware of is the x86-TSO memory-ordering mode - most ARM chips don't support this, but the M-series have it so that Rosetta can toggle it on for x86 emulation.
I'm not sure what the total cost of these are, but it's not zero.
> There are only a handful of different instructions that account for 90% of all operations executed, and, near the top of that list are addition and subtraction. On ARM these can optionally set the four-bit NZCV register, whereas on x86 these always set six flag bits: CF, ZF, SF and OF (which correspond well-enough to NZCV), as well as PF (the parity flag) and AF (the adjust flag).
> Emulating the last two in software is possible (and seems to be supported by Rosetta 2 for Linux), but can be rather expensive. Most software won’t notice if you get these wrong, but some software will. The Apple M1 has an undocumented extension that, when enabled, ensures instructions like ADDS, SUBS and CMP compute PF and AF and store them as bits 26 and 27 of NZCV respectively, providing accurate emulation with no performance penalty.
https://dougallj.wordpress.com/2022/11/09/why-is-rosetta-2-f...
There's another big one, 4K page support. The MMU can be told to set up a virtual address space with smaller, x86-compatible 4096-byte memory pages instead of the default 16384-byte pages.
Those are still needed for the Rosetta use-cases that are sticking around (old games, Linux binaries)
It’s software.
Enjoy paying for your yearly Adobe subscription as your shrink wrap software won’t work.
This would be very bad for Wine too. I think Wine has some answer to this, since Wine does run on Android, but I think it won’t make the current easy path that is just brew install wine and be done.
Buy a gaming desktop PC my guy. Great performance, no cooling issues. Even pre-builts are somewhat good now.