Will CoH run on the new Apple M1 Processor-based hardware?

[Abraxus]

I was reading about the power that Apple's internally developed processor (M1 Pro, and M1 Max) brings to their new MacBooks, and, no doubt, soon to be included in their desktop offerings as well.  As connected as I am to CoH, I guess it's should have come as no surprise to myself when the first thing that came to mind is how this would affect the ability of CoH to run natively on the MAC OS. 

Anybody got any information in this area?

Edited October 18, 2021 by Abraxus

[macskull]

The game's been running on M1 Macs for a while now.

[Abraxus]

Interesting.  I would have thought the architectural differences would have required some major coding changes, or a backwards-compatibilty shell of some kind to be in place.  Kind of like when Apple went from the PowerPC chip, to Intel archtecture. 

[aethereal]

1 minute ago, Abraxus said:

Interesting.  I would have thought the architectural differences would have required some major coding changes, or a backwards-compatibilty shell of some kind to be in place.  Kind of like when Apple went from the PowerPC chip, to Intel archtecture. 

M1-based Macs can run tradtional Mac software.  However, they don't typically get the excellent performance that one sees attributed to them except for software designed for the new architecture.  (There's some kind of translation or emulation layer that lets them run "normal" Mac software).

 

Since CoH is so old, we generally aren't depending a lot on high-end performance in order to have a good game experience.  But I'd be interested in people who have run CoH on the existing M1 Macs chiming in about their performance experiences.

[WanderingAries]

4 hours ago, Abraxus said:

Interesting.  I would have thought the architectural differences would have required some major coding changes, or a backwards-compatibilty shell of some kind to be in place.  Kind of like when Apple went from the PowerPC chip, to Intel archtecture. 

 

Very good points, but give or take some related bumps, Manga has been doing an awesome job keeping things running. Give or take a MacOS update breaking things here and there. Checkout my links for some help and see some of the threads I've commented in this past month for the other troubleshooting as needed. As always, HC has a discord as well for more realtime stuff.

[macskull]

5 hours ago, Abraxus said:

Interesting.  I would have thought the architectural differences would have required some major coding changes, or a backwards-compatibilty shell of some kind to be in place.  Kind of like when Apple went from the PowerPC chip, to Intel archtecture. 

It runs through Wine, which is running through (AFAIK) Rosetta. There are several people on these boards running the game on M1 machines and haven't reported any performance issues.

[Shenanigunner]

Aren't we quite a ways from hardware being a defining element of application compatibility? Seems abstraction and virtualization and so forth is universal. This isn't the era where you had to have a specific BIOS to run Flight Simulator because it bypassed DOS for direct hardware calls. 🙂

[Glacier Peak]

Yeah, COH is definitely operational over virtualization. I think I ran 10 instances over my own server using less than 16GBs of RAM and maaaaaaaybe 2 cores of my CPU? Maybe? Virtualization is the future man, just tell the program you got what it needs and the program doesn't know any difference between a physical system and a virtual one. I dunno how that works on modern stuff, but it works pretty universally (with the right software supporting) over virtualization.

[macskull]

On 10/19/2021 at 7:31 AM, Shenanigunner said:

Aren't we quite a ways from hardware being a defining element of application compatibility? Seems abstraction and virtualization and so forth is universal. This isn't the era where you had to have a specific BIOS to run Flight Simulator because it bypassed DOS for direct hardware calls. 🙂

Ehhh, not exactly. On an M1 Mac the game is being run through at least two layers of translation/emulation so there's a bit of overhead. It'll run though.

[Gorgar]

I am running on an M1 Mac Mini with 16G ram and have had no issues dual-boxing.  I don't even notice the second instance having any impact.  It's better than my dedicated Windows gaming box from a few years ago.