Progression of technology gives me the warm fuzzies (Gaming)

by slycrel , Saturday, October 19, 2019, 13:42 (1644 days ago) @ Cody Miller

There are a lot of reasons, but it comes down to CPU architecture and memory addressing, and the way the operating system has to manage your hardware. Programs fundamentally interact with the 32 bit vs 64 bit system in a different way. For example, dual support on a mac has literally 2 copies of the frameworks on your system -- a 32 bit copy and 64 bit copy. In order for the old software to run on 64 bit systems means an awful lot of system work to support multiple CPU/memory environments. And the guts of your system have to know the difference and be written twice to simulate the old hardware.

Programs can be updated and re-compiled from 32 bit to 64 bit, but obviously that's not going to happen for a lot of software. This isn't much different than any other thing that apple or others have done in the past -- PPC to x86 architecture change, MacOS classic vs OS X support, etc.

My suggested solution would be to run an older copy of OS X in a virtual machine. That's supported by apple I believe as of OS X 10.6 or 10.7.