Running OpenSpace on ARM64 hardware like Apple Silicon Macs

The OpenSpace project has officially removed support for Mac, and newer commits make OpenGL 4.6 the minimum required version. Since Apple has frozen OpenGL support on MacOS at 4.1 (and even that is without support for some features like double-precision math in shaders), getting OpenSpace to run natively on MacOS seems difficult. 

Unfortunately, even earlier releases of OpenSpace can't be built for Mac, even with patches, due to external dependencies whose referenced older commits have been rebased away. 

The way out seems to be to use the older official releases with VMWare Windows 11 for best performance, with the current official release running atop VMWare only with software rendering. 

Edit: VMWare Fusion can be downloaded by following the links from https://www.vmware.com/products/desktop-hypervisor/workstation-and-fusion - a free login needs to be created for support.broadcom.com following which we can follow the link to the free downloads area and download VMWare Fusion (which runs on MacOS hosts) or WMWare Desktop (which runs on Windows hosts). As their FAQ page says, these products are free to use for educational, personal or commercial use after 2025.

https://github.com/hn-88/OpenSpace-AppImage/wiki/OpenSpace-on-ARM64 

There is a table of performance tests on various configurations, OpenSpace versions and drivers at
https://github.com/hn-88/OpenSpace-AppImage/wiki/OpenSpace-on-Mac#running-openspace-on-vms-in-macos

Interestingly, 0.21.x official x86 OpenSpace releases can run on Win11-ARM VMs on VMWare - the prism virtualization handles the x86 to ARM translation.

But 0.22.x official x86 OpenSpace releases can't run on Win11-ARM VMs on VMWare - the minimum OpenGL requirement has been bumped to 4.6, while VMWare's Windows drivers currently supply up to OpenGL 4.3.

In order to run OpenSpace 0.22.x with software rendering on Windows, we need to copy opengl32.dll from https://github.com/mmozeiko/build-mesa/releases/latest as mentioned at https://github.com/hn-88/OpenSpace-AppImage/issues/141 - and the dll architecture must match the OpenSpace binary's architecture. Further, the prism emulation layer can't handle x86 OpenGL dlls. So, only the ARM build of OpenSpace 0.22.x can currently run with software rendering, with the limitations like lack of molecule module, etc.