Emulation

Emulation and virtualization on iPad in 2025

On a personal level, the last 12 months have been a lot. I stopped posting weekly updates back in June 2024 and I’ve been posting on an ad hoc basis since then. This probably explains why I missed the news that in April 2024 Apple approved retro console emulators in the App store; a decision that it subsequently updated to include retro computer emulators. I also missed that in the same month AlStore PAL, an alternative app store, launched in the EU; and while there was initially a small annual fee, a grant from Epic Games means that it’s now free. This is game-changing for emulation and virtualization on iPads (and to a lesser extent on iPhones too).

Running Xilinx ISE on an M1 Mac

Back in March 2022, I did a write-up of how to run Xilinx Vivado on an M1 Mac to generate cores for the Artix-7 series of FPGAs (as used on the Mega 65). The easiest solution is to run the Intel binaries on ARM Windows under Parallels Desktop. But it’s also possible to use the Linux binaries with UTM.

Playing the greatest 4X game of all time on modern hardware

Having spent my free time over the past couple of weeks binge-watching all 12 seasons of Tony Bourdain’s award-winning CNN series Parts Unknown (because it’s leaving Netflix in June), I haven’t been doing much extracurricular development. I’m also sleep-deprived. So when I was looking through the article ideas list, I went for the lowest hanging fruit. This will be a more rambling article than usual, but it may accidentally include some information that’s of use to developers.

Running Xilinx Vivado on an M1 Mac

I’ve written before about running non-Apple Intel binaries on an M1 Mac. The solutions I discussed work for most general purpose apps, but there was one app in particular that I’d previously been running on Windows 10, that I really wanted to get working on an M1 Mac: Xilinx Vivado.

Running non-Apple Intel binaries on an M1 Mac

Since late 2018, I’ve been developing on Apple Silicon. You can read about it in an earlier article. But that’s using an iPad, and the only native builds I can do rely on an app that’s no longer available. What most people think of developing on Apple Silicon, they’re thinking of M1 Macs. And I’ve been doing that since May 2021.

Running ARM Linux on an M1 Mac

Next week, I’m going to look at running non-Apple Intel binaries on M1 Macs. But today, I’ll go over some options for running ARM Linux on M1 Macs. Specifically, I’m going to cover Ubuntu because it’s the most straightforward install. Why would you want to do this? Well, as good as homebrew is, I’ve found that there are quite a lot of missing packages and my experience of building from source on the latest macOS hasn’t been a particularly pleasant one.