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.
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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.
It's not really practical.
UTM is your best bet, as it wraps Qemu in a GUI and supports apple's virtualisation framework to run ARM OSs natively while emulating for X86, Power PC and pretty much any other processor you can think of. However it is slow, even running windows 9X is laggy especially with any kind of speech support. There's too much keyboard lag to play any game that requires reactive keyboard input. There's also the fact to consider that older operating systems were designed to run on hard disks, not flash storage, and they're unaware of the write cycle limitations of flash storage and running them can cause excessive SSD wear to the internal drive of your Mac, which cannot be replaced. So if you do try it, best to run your machines from an external drive.
ARM versions of windows 11 do run fine though, and the X86 emulation is pretty good for the most part. Keyboard input is still a bit laggy, but it's a software passthrough so that is to be expected. It's fine as a PC alternative for those times you need to use NVDA in a browser because Voiceover is misbehaving. But really, your best bet is to keep an old machine around. I've been thinking of getting an old computer just for this purpose as i have a massive library of games that I haven't played in years. I'd also like to write a book but would prefer to do it on something with no internet access to limit distraction, and ti seems an old machine (with suitable backups) would be ideal.
Windows 7, 8 and 10 don't work on arm baced macs but
Windows 11 does work in Parallels as well as in utm and fusion on apple silicon macs. Windows 10 if you get the arm version should work as well in theory but have no idea how would you get about getting that iso plus it’s obsolete so you probably don’t want to use it
I actually got win7 to work in UTM.
It was several years ago, but i was able to install it.
It was laggy and hard to navigate, but it shows that win7, and maybe 8, hav not tested 10 do infact work on an m1 mac when I tried it before..
Better yet
Get yourself an older Mac computer, one with an actual HDD. Then, BootCamp an earlier version of Windows onto it. Epic win!