Home Page Forums MAME Non-Windows MAME Support State of MAME on M1 Macs?

Hello, what is the current state of MAME running on M1 (Apple Silicon) based Macs?

Last I heard there were some issues with BGFX running slowly with Metal and OpenGL had to be used instead.

Any progress on the dynamic recompiler supporting ARM ? I recall the 3D games were to be avoided.

Has anyone tested on the M1 Pro or M1 Max based MacBook Pros (14" or 16") yet?

M1 is a supported target, but as far as I'm aware not much has changed on any of those things. I wasn't expecting to be the only person maintaining the Mac support when I started all of this. I could really use someone who knows Cocoa a lot better to help get the Mac-native (no SDL) support to work, but no such thing has materialized.

I feel kind of guilty about no longer contributing to MAME’s Mac support, but I’ve been burned pretty badly by some of Apple’s policy decisions, and I can no longer justify buying Macs for myself. Getting an M1 Mac and committing to improving MAME support on M1 would be getting close to treating MAME like a day job, and understandably no-one’s going to pay me to do that. I’m having enough trouble finding the time/energy to actually complete some of the more strategic features that affect all platforms. I know it’s not the answer people want to hear.

I don't have a lot of bandwidth but I do know Cocoa fairly well at this point. If there's something specific that you'd like me to look at, then shout.

It's been a few months since I started this thread. Any news? I've been thinking about upgrading to one of the new Macs with M1 chips but would it make more sense to stick with my Intel based iMac for now for best MAME support and performance? Thanks.

Hi Will, maybe my own user experience helps you:

https://mameonmacs.blogspot.com/2021/02/mame-on-apple-m1-as-good-as-expected.html

Nothing scientific, just some benchmarking with my old favs. The M1 mini is the best Mac I had so far.

Cheers!

There hasn't been any specific progress on AArch64 targets since last time. We have upgraded to a version of asmjit that supports AArch64 in that time, but it still needs a DRC backend. I had a major real-life thing happen that knocked me off of MAME for a while, and work's gotten more intense in the new year so it's been a rough few months. For non-DRC games, M1 is still among the fastest options around on a native compile, and for the DRC games running the Intel version on Rosetta does pretty well.