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?