CrossOver Support - Community Forums

I bought a crossover license last year after purchasing my M1 Mac only to find that it didn’t work. Ok, fair enough; New silicon, etc. so I sat on my hands for a year waiting for Codeweavers to support my new machine. Yesterday, the new version was released, promising Monterey support. Unfortunately, what they didn’t tell us is that Monterey support ≠ M1 Support. Everything I tried ran painfully slow. I contacted tech support who cheerfully blamed it on Rosetta and advised me to stick to 64-bit apps. Has anybody had any better luck running 32-bit apps on Apple Silicon?

Hi Thomas,

A couple of comments here:

• "Monterey support" does not mean "every application will work on Monterey, Intel or M1." We have had support for M1 machines since CrossOver 20, which also doesn't mean "every application will work on M1 machines." Sadly, there are always applications that won't work on any platform, on just Mac or just M1 Macs for a variety of reasons. This is exactly the reason we recommend the 14-day trial since we know not everything works.

• Our support team did not convey the message that all 32-bit applications do not work on Rosetta. We do know of performance issues that plague some 32-bit applications, and we do have bugs open for those issues. Some of those issues can potentially be fixed like us, and we report issues that are Rosetta bugs to Apple so they can hopefully fix them in an update to Monterey.

Best,
Meredith

As mentioned by Meredith some 32Bit applications will run like crap under Rosetta2 but will run just fine on an Intel Mac with the same version of macOS.

If an application used to take advantage of some hardware level optimization this won’t function under Rosetta2 and unless Apple wants to account for this (doubtful since Xcode avoid those)

And example of a wine bug would be Red Alert2 being unplayable (use cnc-ddraw)

There’s some more complicated bugs that are a combination of Darwin/wine bugs that get worked around (Steam/CEF)

A Darwin bug that happens only on Apple Silicon would be the lack of being able to select lower screen resolutions that’s also worked around by wine.

32bit is completely unsupported in macOS. Running 32bit Windows apps using CrossOver is a super magic they have created to do so. There are penalties in speed for this due to overhead. M1 lack 32bit registers to run anything 32bit. Microsoft use to simple crass an app in Windows ARM due to this until they build some shims to do it. So in conclusion, it's not a Rosetta thing as much as it's some overhead. This might improve over time due to optimizations, but end of the day you are running something entirely incompatible with the architecture.

Just wanted to throw my two cents in here. I've spent a lot of my spare time the last few weeks seeking a good solution for running a selection of older 32-bit Windows games on my new M1 Max MBP and have come away thoroughly dissatisfied.

I really hope that a better solution can be reached as far as 32 bit support in CrossOver. I would love to buy CrossOver since it's a project I am much more eager to support than Parallels. But with performance so poor I sadly just can't justify it.

Is the hangup just with Apple and needed updates to Rosetta? It's very puzzling to me why performance is dramatically better in Parallels, even considering the hangups with 32 bit to 64 bit translation in CrossOver. What does ARM Windows 11 do to run 32 bit binaries so well such that Parallels can get 10 times higher framerates than Wine/CrossOver while emulating all of Windows at the same time?

If the hangup is purely on Apple's end, have there been any signals that Rosetta updates are coming that might improve performance? If not, is there anything else that can be done on CodeWeavers' end to improve 32 bit support?

I hope I do not come across as frustrated at CrossOver. What you all have done is great and it's amazing that these 32 bit games run at all! But performance right now is quite a sad state of affairs. You may not have any updates to give, but if you do, I hope you will keep us apprised as I'm sure there are many others hoping to keep these 32 bit games alive.

Thanks.

Rosetta 2 does not support 32-bit apps.

32-Bit will most likely never work as good on m1 Macs through emulation as they do on a parallels windows installation, that's because windows still supports 32-Bit while apple has not for some time now. Basically apple will not make it better, and may even make it harder as they explicitly force 64-Bit. An update to rosetta will not fix, this isn't something crossover can overcome, hard stop. If you want to play something older that's 32-Bit, most likely you will have a better time in parallels. Crossover is great for what it is, a wine skin that actively supports with wine project, but understand that wine is limited, is NOT an emulator, and there are huge penalties for running 32-Bit on m1 Macs without emulation. I have crossover, but anything I need to play almost always works better in parallels for that reason. Old games are 32-Bit and new games are DX12 which is also not supported by wine. You can track progress on the wine side to see where crossover is headed though.