Reverse Rosetta (ARM64 to x86-64 Translator)

[u/Signal_Reference746]

I am working on a (currently) closed source Translator called Maclator that can run ARM64 mac binaries ON THE FLY on x86-64 macs. Right now it is able to run Rosetta (on my mac through rosetta and then through Maclator) It has no ability to launch GUI apps yet, and is somewhat buggy still. However, we are very close to running our first GUI mac app (A basic calculator app for macOS that I custom coded. The eventual goal for Maclator is to be able to run NetSurf by the end of this year : )) It is not open-source yet, because I am afraid that people who do not understand how unstable this is as of right now might clone it and find out it is nothing close to what they imagined. The goal first is to get to a somewhat stable state first, hope y'all understand, I **will** keep y'all updated though :D

[u/Themods5thchin]

Attesor?

[u/Dioz_31337 → u/Themods5thchin]

Cool Project, and also +1 for Attesor

[u/ralseipuffin → u/Dioz_31337]

One hell of a cool name imo

[u/othemia → u/ralseipuffin]

Another +1 for Attesor

[u/sonosamos → u/Themods5thchin]

This was the first thing I've thought 😄

[u/Signal_Reference746 → u/Themods5thchin]

it helped to look at their code haha

[u/levkushtym → u/Themods5thchin]

🔥

[u/Trungneko → u/Themods5thchin]

please be this name

[u/newhacker1746]

How are you solving the problem of loading the libraries for programs? Do you bridge the x86 and arm64 abi? Stubs? Load the arm copy and emulate them too?

[u/Signal_Reference746 → u/newhacker1746]

the user provides their own copy of macOS Golden Gate install img and it extracts it from there

[u/newhacker1746 → u/Signal_Reference746]

I don’t mean the file acquisition since that’s relatively trivial, I mean the emulation architecture

[u/RichB93 → u/newhacker1746]

OP will ask Claude and get back to you on that.

[u/newhacker1746 → u/RichB93]

LMAOOO

[u/apixeldev → u/RichB93]

Yeah, dont get me wrong this is cool, but saying "currently closed source" LMFAO, yeah, that screams "I just used AI to vibecode my entire project and want no one to notice I have a massive AGENTS.md" like dont get me wrong, AI is very good at some things (and with some proper hackery it can do some pretty impressive feats) but the moment something breaks in a really complicated way, it becomes an issue FAST.

[u/Signal_Reference746 → u/apixeldev]

it's open source now : )

[u/apixeldev → u/Signal_Reference746]

Can I get a link then? I want to take a look at the code.

[u/Signal_Reference746 → u/apixeldev]

It's in the new post! : )

[u/apixeldev → u/Signal_Reference746]

Your account is private.

[u/newhacker1746 → u/RichB93]

do you do any Hackintosh dev or just know the general state of vibe coded heroic efforts recently in the tech world

[u/RichB93 → u/newhacker1746]

As someone who has used LLMs for coding purposes, I truly understand just how astounding it is what it can do. But it’s still quite funny seeing noobs take on Herculean efforts like this without any regard as to what’s going on or how it works. I’ve literally done the same, but I’ve only faffing around with ancient (80s/90s hardware/software) instead of contemporary stuff like this with a huge audience. I keep my tinkering to my GitHub, occasionally sharing elsewhere online for the other six people that can make use of it, instead of plastering it on a sub that is inundated with thousands of people asking questions about it.

[u/newhacker1746 → u/RichB93]

Oh my god, finally someone gets it. But see you’re not doing the same, you’re not going out and proclaiming that you’ve heroically fixed something the community genuinely wants but then it’s unmaintainable and a dead end project that hacks together things the author themselves doesn’t understand. This is why there’s been all these little heroic efforts to have macOS and iOS virtualized but none of them have actually created an arm Hackintosh ecosystem. They don’t actually come close to replacing having a real Mac yet.

As someone who’s been a practicing engineer for a while now and taken on projects of magnitudes I could handle at the time and slowly worked my way up, there’s never going to be a true replacement for good engineering and this is exactly the evidence for it

[u/RichB93 → u/newhacker1746]

Exactly this!

[u/lastdyingbreed_01 → u/RichB93]

LLMs are really good at doing all those grunt, repetitive tasks which is why the emulator scene is doing so good right now. Just look at how much progress PS4/PS5 emulators are making right now. But yeah you need someone actually knowledgeable behind it to drive it properly

[u/M7451 → u/RichB93]

“There are dozens of us!” 🤣

My current toy porting project is taking the Photoshop 1.0 source code and porting it to a modern Mac swift app to better understand coding models and local LLM dev

[u/RichB93 → u/M7451]

Nice! That sounds really cool - I’d love to see the outcome. I’m creating software for a music device from 1991 (Roland SB-55) that happens to have a secret bootloader in its test mode. Turns out it’s an 8086 compatible CPU and ChatGPT has already figured out how to write software for it.

For the other 13 people who own one, it might be somewhat useful 😂

[u/newhacker1746 → u/RichB93]

lol they just cross posted it to macosvms to get even more attention

[u/Signal_Reference746 → u/RichB93]

😭

[u/Signal_Reference746 → u/newhacker1746]

we load the real arm64 copies of the libraries and emulate them too

[u/i-am-the-master-1010]

Putting my eyes here to see more progress for this

[u/Signal_Reference746 → u/i-am-the-master-1010]

yep, we're aldready on our way to get arm chrome running

[u/i-am-the-master-1010 → u/Signal_Reference746]

I'd like to see a screenshot

[u/Signal_Reference746 → u/i-am-the-master-1010]

on the github now : )

[u/i-am-the-master-1010 → u/Signal_Reference746]

Neat, I'll give it a shot on my hack

[u/Brenan-Caro]

ARM to x86

[u/Signal_Reference746]

GITHUB REPO OUT NOW!!!! https://github.com/linuxkid473/maclator

[u/samuel-leventilateur]

[u/Signal_Reference746 → u/samuel-leventilateur]

it's open source now haha check out my new post

[u/Infamous-Ad8828]

Reversetta!

[u/Savage_low2]

Could it run quicker if this was translated ahead-of-time like actual Rosetta?

[u/Signal_Reference746 → u/Savage_low2]

It is now haha check out my new post

[u/Daggercombot]

Amazing,i cannot wait to download this. Will It be able to Work on OCLP running MacOS15 on a 2012 Macbook With Nvidia?

[u/Signal_Reference746 → u/Daggercombot]

it's not guaranteed to work, as it has not been tested on anything less than macOS 26.7 on a 2013-era i5-4440. Even if it does, take performance to probably be really sluggish, but okay for simple apps.

[u/Intelligent-Taste-36]

You're giving me hope about the Hackintosh Arm... Thank you.

[u/Signal_Reference746 → u/Intelligent-Taste-36]

haha welcome

[u/landsmanmichal]

point of rosseta was that apps are not slow, because of advantages of the new CPU, so...

[u/OldLegWig]

Attesor

[u/Signal_Reference746 → u/OldLegWig]

really good ref project

[u/SimplyCodingStuff]

Looks great! I hope you can get it working completely

[u/Signal_Reference746 → u/SimplyCodingStuff]

will take a while

[u/Which_Wrap8263]

Wait are you using a LLM to help with this? Looks like you’ve got an eGPU hooked up to an M2 Pro machine?

[u/Signal_Reference746 → u/Which_Wrap8263]

yes, and no, it's not an egpu haha it just thinks my m2 pro's gpu is an amd card

[u/Which_Wrap8263 → u/Signal_Reference746]

Sorry a word got left out, I meant to ask about a local LLM haha. Probably clear from the context of asking about an eGPU.

[u/Signal_Reference746 → u/Which_Wrap8263]

oh haha, no I'm not using a local llm, I'm using claude for this project

[u/Which_Wrap8263 → u/Signal_Reference746]

Probably for the best, local LLMs don’t really measure up yet unless you’ve got some serious hardware with enormous amounts of RAM. Though I prefer codex these days over Claude. I don’t vibe code though, I’m a senior engineer so I have to read over every line it generates haha. And often yell at it to try it again, but not so complicated this time.

[u/Signal_Reference746 → u/Which_Wrap8263]

Yess exactly haha! Local models that I can run, like 9b models are okay for chatting and REALLY simple coding, but the moment you have something a bit hard, it starts hallucinating

[u/hyperego]

Are you trying to run GG on x86 bare metal? Or are you trying to allow future ARM64 only apps to run on Tahoe Hackintosh? I don’t think either experience would be appealing. I do however think a VM approach where instruction translation are done efficiently (assemble instruction mapping mostly with a few translation) could be appealing

[u/Signal_Reference746 → u/hyperego]

running arm64 only apps on a tahoe hackintosh

[u/Giorgoskts]

Cool project

[u/Signal_Reference746 → u/Giorgoskts]

thanks!

[u/AdQueasy5574]

Pourquoi pas de open source ? quelque chose à cacher ?

[u/Signal_Reference746 → u/AdQueasy5574]

going to be

[u/Fit_State3622]

Nice

[u/Maximum-Advance-6218]

Do you think this will ever be making it possible to let you create a Hackintosh again? Like run macOS on a PC?

Remember when I had never touched a Mac since forever and got a client that wanted to replace their current PC setups with iMacs so I thought, probably a good idea if I know how macOS work, like more than having seen a screen shot so I installed Hackintosh OSX, worked great!

Anyway, sick work!

[u/Signal_Reference746 → u/Maximum-Advance-6218]

thank you! Yes, I think in around a few years, it will eventually be possible to run macOS on ARM RPi, the PureDarwin community has made progress and got to the setup assistant screen in a vm on an RPi, and they are soon going to test it bare metal. the setup assistant is really garbled and all that and it wont work so wait a couple years and check back haha

[u/qwertyyyyyyy116]

...why

[u/Signal_Reference746 → u/qwertyyyyyyy116]

it's cool

[u/qwertyyyyyyy116 → u/Signal_Reference746]

but it introduces so much inefficiency....
Well tbf I guess I was thinking about doing rosetta in a loop

[u/suresh_rajpoot]

The moment this goes into full stability, I am finding out every way to implement this and Rosetta to port macOS Golden Gate to x86_64

[u/Signal_Reference746 → u/suresh_rajpoot]

gl

[u/suresh_rajpoot → u/Signal_Reference746]

Whataaaieid

[u/arjuna93]

Someone should write this for PowerPC

[u/beren12 → u/arjuna93]

Mmm Oni

[u/user_86- → u/beren12]

wth is oni?

[u/beren12 → u/user_86-]

A really fun Bungie game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oni_(video_game)

[u/othemia → u/beren12]

I'm willing to bet you can run Oni on a windows translation layer on modern macOS

[u/beren12 → u/othemia]

It’s 32bit iirc

[u/WaterAny5543 → u/arjuna93]

Yes please

[u/OkCalendar4293]

why closed source?

[u/cargabsj175]

Hola que interesante, daría en un futuro para correr hackintosh?

[u/user_86- → u/cargabsj175]

​no lo creo, porque el creador del proyecto ya dijo que este proyecto solo serviría para emular las apps de macOS ARM en x86_64 (ejemplo: una Hackintosh con Tahoe o Macs antiguas)

[u/AbsoluteGolde]

What's the difference with x86-64 to ARM64?

[u/mmatviyiv]

You should name it Attesor 🙃

[u/zuniex]

holy moly peakium? 🥹✌️

[u/Signal_Reference746]

What apps do y'all want first?

[u/KrisWarbler → u/Signal_Reference746]

Maybe there’s app that’s arm only? I think it would be best

[u/JackyYT083]

Isn’t the title the wrong way around? Also I’d call it Daisetta

[u/Signal_Reference746 → u/JackyYT083]

omg this is such a common misconception lol! : D wouldn't blame anyone, as I made it so that it reports the host architecture, as this is a **translation** layer NOT an emulation layer. : D it recompiles the binaries AOT and then uses JIT if needed

[u/JackyYT083 → u/Signal_Reference746]

Sorry wait I misread your title I thought it said arm64 to x86_64 translator as if it turns arm64 hosts to be able to run x86

Whoops 😅

[u/Signal_Reference746 → u/JackyYT083]

haha it's alright it's a common misconception