In the past few days I’ve searched high and low for a solution that would allow me to release the update with an Apple Silicon native binary – however, as noted in the previous post it was being held back by BASSZXTUNE not being available for M1 Macs. But I couldn’t let it go, especially after making you wait for so long.

Since a few hours ago, the proof-of-concept has been implemented into the update and am happy to report that Colibri 2.0 will have native Apple Silicon support – which means that you’ll be able to run Colibri natively on your shiny new M1 Macs! Here’s a screenshot of Activity Monitor while the development version of Colibri is running:

There is a tradeoff in making all this happen though:
when running Colibri on Apple Silicon hardware, ZXTune will be unavailable. This means that the more exotic tracker formats (for which ZXTune via BASSZXTUNE provides decoding support) will not open and show an unsupported error message.

This change does not affect Intel-based Macs, ZXTune will continue to operate under the x86_64 architecture as expected.

Until a compatible version of ZXTune and BASSZXTUNE is available, Colibri won’t be able to use this library on Apple Silicon machines. I am actively working on remedying this situation and will let you know if I have a viable solution.

In other news I’m still spending all my free time on the update and am getting there. More to follow shortly!