I am curious if anyone has tried running OpenSim 4.x on a Mac with Apple's new M1 chip.
I know that no native M1 build exists for OpenSim, so the question is whether OpenSim still works when running in Rosetta 2 emulation mode.
If anyone has any experience here, I would love to hear whether or not OpenSim 4.x is working well for you on the Apple M1 chip.
Does OpenSim 4.x Work on Apple M1 Chip?
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B.J. Fregly
- Posts: 51
- Joined: Wed Mar 12, 2008 6:55 am
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B.J. Fregly
- Posts: 51
- Joined: Wed Mar 12, 2008 6:55 am
Re: Does OpenSim 4.x Work on Apple M1 Chip?
So I will now answer my own question 
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My daughter was visiting and she has a Macbook Air with the new Apple M1 chip in it. I installed OpenSim 4.2 on it and did Tutorial 3 involving Model Scaling, Inverse Kinematics, and Inverse Dynamics, plus I tacked on Static Optimization for good measure.
The good news - all of the analyses seemed to work fine, and no crashes occurred.
The minor bad news - some of the menu items in the various dialog boxes did not show up since the menus were completely black. Those items were typically labels for entities contained in the column below (e.g., Body Name column label). Furthermore, when a tab was selected in a dialog box, the new color for the text in the tab was almost the same as the color of the dialog box background, making the text extremely difficult to read.
So overall, it appears that OpenSim is usable in Rosetta 2 emulation mode on the new Apple M1 chip. The primary required bug fix so far seems to be some tweaking of the GUI color scheme.
.My daughter was visiting and she has a Macbook Air with the new Apple M1 chip in it. I installed OpenSim 4.2 on it and did Tutorial 3 involving Model Scaling, Inverse Kinematics, and Inverse Dynamics, plus I tacked on Static Optimization for good measure.
The good news - all of the analyses seemed to work fine, and no crashes occurred.
The minor bad news - some of the menu items in the various dialog boxes did not show up since the menus were completely black. Those items were typically labels for entities contained in the column below (e.g., Body Name column label). Furthermore, when a tab was selected in a dialog box, the new color for the text in the tab was almost the same as the color of the dialog box background, making the text extremely difficult to read.
So overall, it appears that OpenSim is usable in Rosetta 2 emulation mode on the new Apple M1 chip. The primary required bug fix so far seems to be some tweaking of the GUI color scheme.