A general purpose Apple Silicon layer for x86-64 PCs. It is a UEFI boot program with an arm64-to-x86-64 translator, a Metal driver for NVIDIA GPUs and a model of Apple silicon hardware. macOS and most apps start, but it is slow and needs much more testing, as of v0.1.0
Huge. I have been desperately looking for a project like this to be able to use https://github.com/seedds/nxnative to be able to play my copy of BOTW on IOS. Thank you for sharing this, I will be trying it this evening.
Is this really needed? I got it working on macOS pretty easily without this. It's all in private repos tho, not exactly easy to share by URL unless you're willing to sign up for a gitea.
Apple still supports the latest ones up to Tahoe, and probably security updates for a few years. You can install Windows 10 (no idea about 11) but that is only updated through next year. After that, there's Linux, of course.
I don’t think there is anything that can make Intel Macs not obsolete. Embrace it - that’s their charm and you should use them as they were intended to be used, and experience them as they were designed, as artifacts of their time.
A general purpose Apple Silicon layer for x86-64 PCs. It is a UEFI boot program with an arm64-to-x86-64 translator, a Metal driver for NVIDIA GPUs and a model of Apple silicon hardware. macOS and most apps start, but it is slow and needs much more testing, as of v0.1.0
Is the intent to support running macOS on it, or rather for e.g. Linux that targets Apple Silicon?
"Are you getting it?"
So, basically an emulator layer that doesn't need a host OS? (I'm not really interested in running Darwin, but that's a cool concept)
I guess one could call it a "bare-metal/type 1 emulator" much like VMs can run in a "bare-metal/type 1 hypervisor".
"An ahead-of-time and just-in-time compiler translates arm64e code to x86-64."
No, not the same, actually. It's more of a Rosetta, but other way round, if I understand this right.
I noticed Golden Gate still ships with an x86_64 kernel (not kernelcache), I wonder if this is any useful
james@Jamess-MacBook-Pro ~ % sw_vers ProductName: macOS ProductVersion: 27.2.1 BuildVersion: 26B131 james@Jamess-MacBook-Pro ~ % file /System/Library/Kernels/kernel /System/Library/Kernels/kernel: Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64 james@Jamess-MacBook-Pro ~ % strings /System/Library/Kernels/kernel | grep "Darwin" @(#)VERSION: Darwin Kernel Version 27.2.0: Wed Oct 14 23:40:09 PDT 2026; root:xnu-13432.41.4~25/RELEASE_X86_64 Darwin Kernel Version 27.2.0: Wed Oct 14 23:40:09 PDT 2026; root:xnu-13432.41.4~25/RELEASE_X86_64 Darwin
This is fascinating. If x64 isn’t supported in Golden Gate why is this present?
Reminds me of how some of the dev versions of Snow Leopard still boot on PowerPC.
Can't the title just say "emulator"?
I thought this was a PCIE card with an Apple M series chip on it.
Sounds like a great use for those new Epyc processors with 256 cores…
Huge. I have been desperately looking for a project like this to be able to use https://github.com/seedds/nxnative to be able to play my copy of BOTW on IOS. Thank you for sharing this, I will be trying it this evening.
Is this really needed? I got it working on macOS pretty easily without this. It's all in private repos tho, not exactly easy to share by URL unless you're willing to sign up for a gitea.
This repository needs a star and a follow. It stops Intel Macs from becoming obsolete, but it is slow and buggy.
Apple still supports the latest ones up to Tahoe, and probably security updates for a few years. You can install Windows 10 (no idea about 11) but that is only updated through next year. After that, there's Linux, of course.
I don’t think there is anything that can make Intel Macs not obsolete. Embrace it - that’s their charm and you should use them as they were intended to be used, and experience them as they were designed, as artifacts of their time.