CrossOver Support - Community Forums

Hi

As a user of WINE, both as paid user of Crossover (to help WINE development) and Wineskin, I would like an update on Codeweavers plans to adapt to the future move of Apple to 64-bits applications only (potentially making Crossover unable to run every 32 bits Windows program, including most games), and also deprecating OpenGL.

This move away from 32 bit by Apple has the potential to make Crossover useless in a Mac with the post-Mojave OSx due to be launched final 2019.

Regards

On the 32-bit side, I don't think I can give you much technical details, but I can say that it's something we're very actively working on, and we have good hope that we'll be able to make it work before Apple moves to exclusively 64-bit.

On the OpenGL side, while we think the deprecation of OpenGL by Apple is rather unfortunate, the plan is to introduce a Vulkan backend for wined3d (Wine's Direct3D implementation) post Wine 4.0, which on macOS we'd be able to use in combination with MoltenVK. That's not a secret, but not something we've been actively advertising either, so chances are you heard it here first. We did also explore a Metal backend for wined3d, but ultimately felt that MoltenVK worked sufficiently well that it wasn't worth the additional effort, since Vulkan works on Linux, Android and Chrome OS as well.

Many thanks for your answer.

I really hope that WINE and Crossover can continue to support Mac gaming in the future.

Best regards

Your response is hardly heartening for us Mac users who will not be able to run 32 bit applications when the next version of OSX becomes available at the end of the year. I realise you are working on the update and I would have thought that 6 months would have been enough time to complete the upgrade and that you could have given a definite “yes” response.

However, should you succeed in updating Crossover to 64 bit, will current user of version 18 be eligible for a free upgrade to the new version?

Hello Paul,

We appreciate your concern. Providing support for 32-bit applications in a 64-bit environment is in fact an extremely challenging technical task, one our developers have been working on for well over six months. We are confident we will have a version of CrossOver for macOS providing this support before macOS 10.15 is released later this year.

Like always, customers with one-year or lifetime licenses at the time of release will receive entitlements to CrossOver 19. Users with one-version licenses for CrossOver 18 or other releases will not receive a free upgrade.

Thanks,
Hana

Hello.

So, MacOS Catalina was announced yesterday. It will be available this fall. It will not support 32 bits applications.

How is the progress of your work to maintain support for all the 32 bits software that runs with Crossover ?

Since most of the libraries are provided by CrossOver, it should be possible to run 32-bit applications in 64-bit bottles on macOS. However, noone is forced to install an operating system with less functionality. I won't do it. Apple has messed up with removing 32-bit support, so I will just stay with Mojave and continue using all the apps I'm currently working with.

Could codeweavers share their thoughts on this please?

Bachsau wrote:

\Apple has messed up with removing 32-bit support, so I will just
stay with Mojave and continue using all the apps I'm currently
working with.

I respectfully disagree with you. It's way, way past time to drop 32-bit support. 64-bit has been in wide use for over a decade. Software developers won't move on w/o a push. Apple gets to stop duplicating work w/32-bit and 64-bit versions of support libraries and toolsets and we (hopefully) get faster/more stable system releases that only focus on 64-bit.

xgman wrote:

Could codeweavers share their thoughts on this please?

I second this thought. September is only two months away.

Hello all,

Maintaining support for 32-bit applications on macOS 10.15 Catalina continues to be a top priority for us. We appreciate that September is right around the corner and that macOS users are eager for a solution - we are confident that this support will be available when Catalina is released.

CrossOver 19 will move to beta later this summer. I invite all who are interested in the latest CrossOver development updates and are willing to provide feedback on pre-release versions of CrossOver to join here: https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/beta

Hana

Codeweavers,

Just adding my voice here to say thanks and express my hopes that this effort will be a big relief for Mac users dependent on Windows programs and games. The macOS 64-bit and OpenGL issues are my top concern right now as a Crossover lifetime license holder. Also, I'm probably stating the obvious here, but I'm frankly excited to see what might hopefully be higher performance with wined3d -> MoltenVK instead of OpenGL. Mac's OpenGL drivers are notoriously slow.

Question. What's the plan for Windows games that use OpenGL? If the Mac OpenGL implementation "isn't there" (or severely lacks features/performance), Wine calling into native OpenGL won't work. The developers of MoltenVK have a product offering called MoltenGL that translates GL calls into MoltenVK, but it looks like they are selling it to app developers as a proprietary product that gets bundled with individual apps, rather than a system wide solution that users can install.

I doubt the MoltenGL developers would make their product available to any users of open source Wine, but as a proprietary product, they would probably let you ship MoltenGL with Crossover Mac. You of course have the option to write your own code to translate Windows-side OpenGL calls into Vulkan (or Metal directly), but that would probably be more expensive than just using MoltenGL (if it weren't then they wouldn't have a valid business model).

Just hoping that Windows OpenGL apps continue to be supported at some point. I don't think this point has been brought up yet in the conversation.

Hanna,

What about those of us that already have public beta. Do you have a build for us to test (Nightly or otherwise), even if it is alpha or early availability to start giving you feedback.

It would be great to get an early jump on testing things and provide feedback.

I second this, I just learned about CrossOver because of Apple removing 32bit support. I already signed into the beta tester program and I'm also beta testing Catalina.

Hello Yury and Samir,

We will release an alpha or beta version of CrossOver 19 to macOS testers on the 10.15 beta as soon as such feedback is helpful to our development process. Thank you both for your patience and your willingness to contribute!

Hana

Wow, I will happily buy a Crossover license as soon as there is a beta available with 32-bit support!

I used to have CrossOver years ago (version 13, apparently), but I didn't like the additional complexity (i.e., clunkiness) of the proprietary interface as compared with the hands-off approach of Wineskin. I remember that in trying very hard to simplify things for the user, CrossOver seemed overly conspicuous and kind of messy.

While I hope the interface has improved, I am now coming to understand that in order for Wine to have dedicated (paid) developers, I really need to support CrossOver regardless.

Looking forward to this!

Aratuk wrote:

Wow, I will happily buy a Crossover license as soon as there is a
beta available with 32-bit support!

I used to have CrossOver years ago (version 13, apparently), but I
didn't like the additional complexity (i.e., clunkiness) of the
proprietary interface as compared with the hands-off approach of
Wineskin. I remember that in trying very hard to simplify things for
the user, CrossOver seemed overly conspicuous and kind of messy.

While I hope the interface has improved, I am now coming to
understand that in order for Wine to have dedicated (paid)
developers, I really need to support CrossOver regardless.

Looking forward to this!

To be fair, in my opinion, the CrossOver interface was meant to be less intimidating to users who weren't familiar with Wine. It's been tweaked a bit since CrossOver 13 but I bet you'll still find it clunky compared to Wineskin. The CrossOver interface also allowed for pre-existing packages that put together exactly what native Windows packages or DLLs might be needed in order to have a program run. That saves users a lot of extra research.

Thankfully, for my purposes, Wine has become much better at being able to run applications without needing the extra handholding.

I only have a couple of old Windows applications in CrossOver now. I prefer using Wine itself for most of my Windows applications. That said, I keep my subscription current because codeweavers permits Wine developers to be paid for their work and allows it to improve at a faster rate than if the developers worked on it in their spare time. It's my way to support wine. I also want to see a version that will work in Catalina and be able to run 32-bit Windows binaries.

Bob C

Yes, I've gone ahead and purchased the subscription. No sense in waiting for a beta version if my goal is to support development. I'll give CrossOver itself another go, but in any case it's good to know paid development is going into Wine.

Don't mean to corner the community manager to respond to a rumor but there is another big problem ahead and it is Apple moving desktops and laptops to ARM processors. Is just a rumor right now but pretty much possible.

Samir Gartner wrote:

Don't mean to corner the community manager to respond to a rumor but
there is another big problem ahead and it is Apple moving desktops
and laptops to ARM processors. Is just a rumor right now but pretty
much possible.

It's all but confirmed I do believe. Mac Native apps should have no issue with the transition as Xcode is already setup to deal with it. In addition, Wine started working on ARM support back in 2009 and seems to have a fork that will run x86 apps on ARM devices. Also appears to be decent work on getting 64bit native into Wine as well.

Hangover on GitHub

We now have a rough estimate of when Catalina will be release. Either the week of 9/9 or 9/16.

Is there any update on a Catalina Supported client?

I know it's not a simple task, and it appears y'all have been working on it for a year now, but any news would be appreciated at this time.

I second this thought. This is vital info for us Mac CrossOver users. An update this close to Catalina deployment would be really welcomed.

Hi Hana,

I have been using Crossover 18.5.0 on Mojave with some DirectX 9 games, and would be very happy to try betas with DX11 support. I have signed up for the beta program, but don't see any downloads available. Is it because my subscription recently lapsed? (Happy to renew that as well..)

As a side note, I am an iOS developer and maintain OpenGL ES and Metal video renderers. I noticed that on the iOS 13.0-beta8 simulator, and 10.14.6 some features like CVOpenGLESTextureCache no longer work properly as they did on iOS 12.4. I'm sure the story of reduced / eroded support with OpenGL on macOS 10.15 is similar to what I've experienced on iOS 13-beta8.

Best,
Chris

My subscription is all up to date now. After browsing the forums it seems like there hasn't been a public beta for Crossover 19 yet, but I'll be sure to leave a test report once its available.

It´s a bit disheartening the lack of meaningful feedback by CodeWeavers about the upcoming MacOS Catalina and the eventual Crossover 19 release...

There were words a few weeks back about a blog post that would talk about this, but the silence continues...

Regards

The fact that nothing in the way of a response is occurring is a bit unnerving.

John Wallace wrote:

The fact that nothing in the way of a response is occurring is a bit
unnerving.

I've been watching here, over at WineHQ, and at FF14's Loadstone (as CodeWeavers handles their macOS port) and the responses boil down to this:

Wine: Let CodeWeavers handle it.
Square: No comment until macOS Catalina has been released.
CodeWeavers: No comment.

I know this is a difficult task, but it's been known for over 2 years that this was coming.

At the very least an honest warning not to update to Catalina if no solution is ready would be nice, since we are a few days from Catalina release...

Come on, guys, say something...

Catalina has a release date set for October.

Will Crossover be ready upon Catalina's official release?

For those that haven't read their blog post, it is unknown when Catalina support will happen.

There are a number of challenges they are still working through not the least of which is trying to get 32bit to run on a pure 64bit platform.

Due to those challenges, and the fact a Metal Renderer needs to be written to replace OpenGL, I don't see this being done before the year is out.

Hello,
I hope you have had a chance to read our blog post that addresses some of your concerns (https://www.codeweavers.com/about/blogs/jschmid/2019/9/10/so-we-dont-have-a-solution-for-catalinayet).

If you have a current subscription of CrossOver, or an expired subscription in the last two years of CrossOver macOS you should have received an email earlier this week stating the following:

[i]If you use CrossOver for Linux you can discard this email.

If you use CrossOver for macOS, this information is very IMPORTANT for you.

Apple will launch the new macOS Catalina sometime in October. Apple decided not to support 32-bit applications with the release of latest Mac operating system, Catalina. This threw our software developers for CrossOver macOS, a HUGE technical challenge that we are not quite yet done solving.

If CrossOver is critical to your macOS experience, we would ask you to wait until a Catalina compatible version is available. At this time, we anticipate that an alpha version will be available sometime within the next 30-60 days. We will continue to update you as development progresses.

What do you need to do?

Please be patient and give us some time.

If CrossOver is important for you to run your Windows apps please do not immediately upgrade your macOS to Catalina. It’s our top priority to make our software compatible with macOS Catalina.

Thank you for your understanding.

Cheers,
The CodeWeavers Team[/i]

If you wish to stay up to date on our progress with Catalina, I suggest you sign up for updates at https://www.codeweavers.com/store/promotions/subscribe where we have a specific mailing list for 'macOS Catalina Updates.'

Jana

Thank you !