Retro gaming and running Linux software are the exceptions.
> Starting with macOS 28, Rosetta 2 will be largely discontinued. Apple says that after that point, it “will keep a subset of Rosetta functionality aimed at supporting older unmaintained gaming titles, that rely on Intel-based frameworks.”
I get why Apple wants to remove it but it genuinely sucks. I can't imagine it costs them a lot to put it into maintenance mode and just support 20 years of macOS games and apps going forward. They want developers to fully move to ARM but older titles or software whose developers have moved on/passed will be lost to the sands of time.
This is awesome, and I can't wait to have the time to set this up and install my GOG library .. but one thing has been bugging me for a long time about my GOG library, and that is: local multiplayer network gaming was awesome then.
So .. is there going to be any chance of getting multiplayer networking setup for some of the GOG's? Has anyone accomplished this in the DOXBox-*'en .app'o-sphere yet?
My favourite project to run these old games was Boxer (1). Based on dosbox, it creates a runnable self contained disk (app) for each game or set of games / software. It is pretty neat, but I am not sure if it has been maintained recently.
I do the opposite and put all games together, with DOS BAT-files to launch the games. I boot up my virtual dream DOS machine by just starting DOSBox-X and then I launch the games the way they are meant to be launched, from the DOS COMMAND.COM command-line. And as I mentioned in another comment, all of that is in one big DOS git repo.
Nice thing with DOSBox-X is there is a built-in command to set config parameters, so for games that require special settings or to slow down etc that can be set up from its launcher BAT file. All games share the same dosbox config file with default settings.
I never had any issues using WINE to install GOG games, but maybe running WINE on a Mac is not as easy now as it was back when I did that on a x86 Mac?
I always run the GOG installer in WINE and then copy the game into my git repo for DOS stuff, make sure the game works, git commit it, and then I know it will always just work and I will not have to think about that again (plus I can version manage all settings and save-games for all the games and also sync between my different machines without relying on any cloud service).
Hmm i guess this would require figuring out how to extract game data from an .exe installer GOG distributes. I guess AI would figure it out in like 3 minutes ;) I’ll check later.
Mind you there are countless DOSBox forks out there and the vanilla original one is probably the least interesting one.
Nowadays the three most popular one would be DOSBox-X, DOSBox Pure, and DOSBox Staging
https://dosbox-x.com/ https://github.com/joncampbell123/dosbox-x
https://schelling.itch.io/dosbox-pure https://github.com/schellingb/dosbox-pure-unleashed/
https://www.dosbox-staging.org/ https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging
Straight from the article:
> there are actively developed alternatives like DOSBox-X
What do you want to be "interesting" about dosbox?
GUI config, load games from zip and image files, controller support, save states, various sound, graphics, and network enhancements etc.
There is more to this than simply being a DOS emulator.
> Starting with macOS 28, Rosetta 2 will be largely discontinued. Apple says that after that point, it “will keep a subset of Rosetta functionality aimed at supporting older unmaintained gaming titles, that rely on Intel-based frameworks.”
https://9to5mac.com/2026/02/16/macos-26-4-will-notify-users-...
It's the Mac native software that hasn't been updated in most of a decade that would be affected.
So .. is there going to be any chance of getting multiplayer networking setup for some of the GOG's? Has anyone accomplished this in the DOXBox-*'en .app'o-sphere yet?
1 boxerapp.com
Nice thing with DOSBox-X is there is a built-in command to set config parameters, so for games that require special settings or to slow down etc that can be set up from its launcher BAT file. All games share the same dosbox config file with default settings.
I always run the GOG installer in WINE and then copy the game into my git repo for DOS stuff, make sure the game works, git commit it, and then I know it will always just work and I will not have to think about that again (plus I can version manage all settings and save-games for all the games and also sync between my different machines without relying on any cloud service).