FWIW, Windows running on a 64-bit host no longer runs 16-bit binaries.
E.g. i have half of macos games in my steam library as a 32-bit mac binaries. I don't know a way to launch them at any reasonable speed. Best way to do it is to ditch macos version altogether and emulate win32 version of the game (witch will run at reasonable speed via wine forks). Somehow Win32 api is THE most stable ABI layer for linux & mac
To be fair, it's the emulation of x86-32 with the new ARM64 architecture that causes the speed problems. That transition is also why MacBooks are the best portables, in terms of efficiency, that you can buy right now.
All ARM chips have crippled x86-32 performance, because they're not x86-32 chips. You'll find the same (generally worse) performance issues trying to run ARM64 code with x86-64.
Which isn't an issue since Windows 95 was not a 16-bit OS, that was MS-DOS. For 16-bit DOS apps there's virtualization things like DOSbox or even HW emulators.
If you're a Mac user, you expect this sort of thing. If running neglected software is critical to you, you run Windows or you keep your old Macs around.
A lot of software is for x64 only.
If Rosetta2 goes away, Parallels support for x64 binaries in VMs likely goes away too. Parallels is not neglected software. The x64 software you'd want to run on Parallels are not neglected software.
This is a short-sighted move. It's also completely unprecedented; Apple has dropped support for previous architectures and runtimes before, but never when the architecture or runtime was the de facto standard.
https://docs.parallels.com/parallels-desktop-developers-guid...
Rosetta 2 never supported emulating a full VM, only individual applications.
https://www.parallels.com/blogs/parallels-desktop-20-2-0/
Nevertheless, running x64 software including Docker containers on aarch64 VMs does use Rosetta. There's still a significant valid use case that has nothing to do with neglected software.
Edited my post above. Thanks for the correction.