Ive been playing about with ways to streamline my processes on my new MB Air
My old VMware fusion machines dont run, and I havent installed Windows ARM in Fusion or Parallels
But I have found that Crossover has a much smaller footprint, and runs my Xojo 2015 setup (the most recent I want to use on Windows) pretty well.
There are some graphics funnies ( text boxes don’t centre for example)
but for a quick test it’s not bad, (debugging works fine) and it looks like I can probably compile there too, which most days is all I need. (Things should draw properly when installed on a real Windows box)
I think this is a real result and preferable in many ways to running a full-on Windows VM
If anything really funky shows up , I’ll let you know.
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+1
Indeed I have been using CrossOver on my Mac Mini M1 to run Fontlab Studio (which does not exist for Mac), A-PDF, and Notepad++. It runs flawlessly with apps not meant for ARM.
I find Crossover much lighter than VMWare Fusion. It runs fast and does not gobble resources.
I did use VMWare Fusion on my Intel machines, and regret all the virtual machines it used cannot be used anymore.
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you can download parallel the demo works 2 weeks IIRC
then download win11 and try xojo
you will see that crossover is around 5x slower…
as I understood Parallels supports only the ARM version of Windows. And this version is no official.
absolutely.
I tried crossover for a customer that had an old 2011 macbookpro with some old XP VM and an app he needed inside. Crossover was working, but the customer told me that it was very slow on a m1 pro macbook compared to his old i7 macbookpro !
so we tried on win 11 arm with parallel, and it was that time really faster.
I did not believe that an old win XP app was working on a Win11 arm ! but it was !
It works really well. Win 11 ARM64 contains a Windows X86 emulator so it runs ARM native and X86 emulated. People run even heavy games on it. Fusion for M1/2 is tech preview, Parallels 18 for M1/2 is released stable.
Yeah. For me, it doesn’t need to be a speedy workhorse.
‘just working’ is good enough.
If I need to run serious Windows apps on the Mac in production, I’ll go Parallels.
For now, Crossover runs all the Windows apps I like/need (PSP, Notepad++ etc ), in a tiny bottle instead of a 50Gb VM
Happy
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That is definitely NOT what I see here.
the app used quite intensive calcs, and we could measure a 2-3x less speed on crossover on M1 than on parallels/i7 on 2011 macboookpro.
I see so many people here complaining on the slow starting xojo that I had to say this about the crossover speed. good for you if you don’t need speed.
The thing is, about start, you got to compound the emulator boot time with that of Xojo.
CrossOver does not have any measurable boot time, whereas Parallel takes a while to be ready to launch Xojo.
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From the dev side of things, I want tho see the native experience user problems. When an app crashes due to some behavior in the real OS, it’s something I must to identify and do something about it. But in an OS emulator, not provided by the OS vendor, something can happen in the emulator and not in the native experience. So that’s the negative point from the dev side. Once you assure that your app works ok in the native side of the things, people can try to use your app in an emulator, and that’s ok. But if people file a bug report from there, and I can’t reproduce in the real OS, that report must be ignored. In such case, the user should report the problem to the CrossOver devs for investigation.
Once you assure that your app works ok in the native side of the things, people can try to use your app in an emulator, and that’s ok. <<
Nobody is suggesting deploying a built Windows app to an M1/M2 device under CrossOver. That would be pointless… I supply them a Mac build.
This post is about using my ARM device to use Mac and Windows versions of Xojo
without having to mess about with Parallels and VMWare, because my existing virtual machines won’t work on the new machine.
I have Xojo Pro. I could compile a Windows build from that if I want to.
But it’s a recent version, compiles with Direct2D not GDI, and so produces an unusable windows app.
I need to compile using Xojo 2015, and I can run that happily inside Crossover.
(Xojo Pro 2015 for Mac is 32bit and won’t run )
TESTING of the built app happens on a real Windows machine.
But Crossover also allows me easily to run windows apps that I like a lot such as old PaintShop Pro, and some favorite Windows apps written for older Windows versions that don’t work after XP
Interesting. I use recent versions, with Direct2D, and it works here.
That’s why it was created, well, as a second priority, the first one was to run some games. My use cases demands the complete set of APIs from the original vendor and all the look and feel and behaviors. So I will need to go the Virtual Machine way.
Dont get me wrong… I can build. Apps start up.
If all I was doing was database work or ‘show me a cat photo’ , it would be fine.
But what I do is graphics intense, and does a lot of screen redraw while the mouse is being used.
Flat out doesn’t work properly after 2015, and I have spent months (cumulatively) fighting to get something working under Direct2D in the years since.
Eventually, I gave up trying.
I will compile and deploy with 2015 until I cannot, and then I will likely shut down the business.
I understand. I skipped entirely 2017, 2018 and 2019 waiting for stabilization of Direct2D and 64bit.
I test compiled from a late 2021 edition today… It’s actually a lot better than it used to be!
(Can’t trust it in the wild without a few weeks testing though…)
This gives me hope…
Having spent a few weeks with Crossover, I find that Xojo crashes in it regularly, which has become a pain.
(I tried once again to compile my main app using a couple of Xojo versions after 2015, and they still produces a slow unresponsive app with drawing issues, so I’m stuck with Xojo 2015 on Windows.)
If I invest in Parallels, how does one go about installing Windows 11 ARM?
There is a dearth of info about this on the web…
Last I knew, Xojo for Windows would not install under Windows 11 ARM and the Xojo installer would say the hardware architecture requires Intel. So if the goal is to run the Xojo IDE and compiler from the VM, this may be an exercise in futility. If this is your goal, you may want to confirm if the IDE will even install. (You can run Xojo apps compiled for Windows, but I think your use case here is the IDE and not running your own programs.)
It has been some time since I set up my Win 11 ARM – and is Parallels 17 instead of 18 – but IIRC my Windows ARM was obtained from MS as part of the Insider Program.