How do most of you play old windows games, and play with old tts engines such as decTalk on the modern macs that use the m4 chip? From what I read, windows xp, 7, 10, 11, they don't work under parallels on arm-based macs. and if arm-based windows11 has to be used for such winidows games, is it easy to get ahold of? one of my family members is a TVI in Washington DC. so if they switch to mac, then I will, because my family member will have questions that I should support her and give answers to, like how I do with jaws, now.
Comments
Maybe try UTM or DOSBox
UTM uses qemu under the hood to do most of the heavy lifting, and qemu is essentially a hardware emulator that falls back to virtualization in some cases and when possible, meaning that it can emulate old x86 hardware just fine, even if with a huge performance hit, and without multithreading support for legacy technical reasons. For even older stuff, DOSBox emulates even older computers with 16-bit and 32-bit x86 CPUs, ancient graphics cards, and the ubiquitous ISA Sound Blaster cards from back in the 90s, so you can run both DOS and 16-bit Windows 3.1 games on those, and maybe even install Windows 95, but I've never actually tried 32-bit Windows on it myself.
I grew up using MS-DOS, 16-bit Windows, and all the old hardware from the early to mid-90s, and the experience of using primitive personal computers was precisely what attracted me to software engineering. Projects like DOSBox bring very fond memories which unfortunately I can no longer relive to their full glory since I went blind 11 years ago. However one day I want to find time to learn proper digital electronics development so that I can clone the OPL3 and EMU8000 chips from YAMAHA and Creative that powered the Sound Blaster AWE32 card, whose sample-based synthesizer blew my young mind when I heard MIDI played on it for the first time back in the day.
Speaking of DOSBox, and to add something that I was almost forgetting due to getting carried away by all the nostalgia, there's a site called Good Old Games that ports games from back then to modern platforms with permission from the current intellectual property owners. In many cases, GOG merely wraps a custom DOSBox installation with each game inside.
old windows xp software
the software I mostly like to use used to run on windows 95, 98 and xp. Can I use that on a modern arm-based mac somehow?
Windows 11 arm has x86 emulation
Windows 11 on arm has x86 emulation and it's actually pretty good. I'm not sure how much it'd be effected by running inside another virtual machine but it is there.