An Intel Mac build, tried without an Intel Mac
By Harold Davis
release devlog intel
After 1.0.0 went out, someone in the community asked whether there would be an Intel version. I only own an M4 Pro, so I could not honestly say yes. Intel Macs stop at macOS 26, and Wine already works reasonably well on them, so I kept the goal small: find out how far a build gets without a rewrite, then hand it to people with the right hardware.
There is now an Intel download on the Download page. It is 53 MB, it needs macOS 13 or later, and it is a separate file from the Apple Silicon one.
What I expected to break
The client translates the game's x86 code into C, compiles that on your Mac, and runs it on a Rust runtime that draws through Metal. On an Intel Mac the C is compiled for x86_64 instead of arm64. I expected a pile of arm64 assumptions in the generated code and there were none, because the code only uses plain C and does the game's x87 and SSE math in software.
The rest was small. The signal handler read arm64 register names to report where a crash happened, and that was the only code that stopped the Rust side from building. I also had to build the bundled compiler a second time, for x86_64. Building it on my Mac took under eight minutes.
I considered one Universal app. It came out at 97 MB, which means everyone on Apple Silicon would download a compiler they never use. So Intel is its own download for now.
What I could test
Rosetta runs the Intel build on my Mac. The whole game translated in 40 seconds, reached the title screen, ran 599 frames at about 26 fps and quit cleanly. The picture at frame 500 was byte for byte the same as the Apple Silicon build's, which tells me the translated code is right.
What I could not test
Under Rosetta the picture is still drawn by my Mac's Apple GPU. Intel and AMD graphics chips treat some things differently, like 16-bit textures and memory that the CPU and GPU do not share. The graphics layer I use has code for those cases, and I switched each of them on with its test options. The title screen came out identical every time. That shows the code runs. It cannot show that a real Intel driver accepts everything we send it.
So this build is honest about being new. If you have an Intel Mac, I would like you to try it and tell me how it went in the Discord. I wrote a short checklist for testers.
macOS 13
Checking what could stop the Intel build from starting, I found a problem in the Apple Silicon release too. The app said it ran on macOS 13, but one of its libraries was built for macOS 15 and called a macOS 15 function without checking. Two small guards and one build setting later, every file in the app says macOS 13. The Intel build has that fix already. Apple Silicon gets it in 1.0.1, which I will release next. Nobody has run either on macOS 13 or 14 yet, so that needs testers as well.
What comes after
First 1.0.1 for Apple Silicon. Then I want a built-in 60 fps option, and after that I want to see what it takes to make the community's add-ons work on a Mac. Those are interface changes, weapons and other mods. I will ask the Clementine team before I promise any of it.