Many 32 bit "incompatible" games work perfectly fine on macOS 10.15+ : over 1000 tested with 400 wrongly labeled as "incompatible"

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SpaceCadet 30 Nov, 2023 @ 3:17am

Many 32 bit "incompatible" games work perfectly fine on macOS 10.15+ : over 1000 tested with 400 wrongly labeled as "incompatible"

Many 32 bit "incompatible" games work perfectly fine on macOS 10.15+ : over 1000 tested with 400 wrongly labeled as "incompatible"

Credit to ksheep on reddit:

"After several days of testing, I have finished going through ~1000 Mac games from my Steam library, cataloging whether or not they work on MacOS 10.15 Catalina. Going off of the Steam claims, only 289 of the games tested were actually listed as compatible, with another 852 listed as not compatible, but over 300 of those “incompatible” games actually launched without an issue. In addition, we found 8 games that are listed as compatible on Steam which are actually incompatible on Catalina. Some additional testing is still needed, as there are ~190 games that were listed as compatible which have not been tested, but everything I have which was labeled as incompatible has been gone over.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17DkOsI9AwAT4dzPkLmunYJJmUpf1FuWR62Q1vAEfJzM/

Last edited by SpaceCadet; 30 Nov, 2023 @ 3:18am

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Showing 1-6 of 6 comments

Cathulhu 30 Nov, 2023 @ 4:11am

Tell that the developers and publishers who forgot to set the flag to mark those games compatible.

emberfrost8 30 Nov, 2023 @ 4:38am

That's actually awesome news! Sometimes, I miss playing some old games because I think they wouldn't run on my Mac. But turns out a lot of games can actually work. I'm gonna test everything on my own skin to make sure it's true.

aiusepsi 30 Nov, 2023 @ 4:43am

I've said it before and I've said it again: Valve's implementation of this incompatibility warning sucks. There's three things they could have done better:

1) The setting they have is "do you support 64-bit, yes/no?" and the default is "no". What they should have done is have a setting with 4 values: unknown, 32-bit only, 64-bit only, 32-bit and 64-bit, with the default being 'unknown'.

That way, the UI could have more cleanly shown which games are actually incompatible with your system, and which the developer just never entered data for.

2) Crowdsourcing the data. Steam knows if the overlay is injected into a 64-bit process, or if a 64-bit process is using the Steamworks API. They could have had the client report back the bitness of games, to fill in the data where the developers didn't.

3) They could have scanned over the game files they have on their own servers to detect what CPU architectures are supported by the executable files in the install of a game. This information is available in the headers of the Mach-O file format used by Mac executables. If every executable in a game's files has 64-bit support, you can go ahead and mark that game as having 64-bit support without any worry.

But they didn't, so here we are.

emberfrost8 1 Dec, 2023 @ 4:41am

The first idea you shared is spot on. Having a more detailed setting that tells users exactly what's up with each game – like if it's really not compatible, or if it's just that no one's updated the info yet – would be super helpful. It'd make it way easier for everyone to figure out what they can play and what they can't, without all the guesswork. It's all about making things clear and straightforward for the users.