macOS support through Granite or MoltenVK

[dbrll]

I'm moving from Windows to a Mac M1, and macOS users are left with little choices when it comes to N64 emulation.
Both GlideN64 for HLE and Angrylion-Plus for LLE depend on OpenGL, which has been deprecated and will be removed in upcoming macOS releases.

How hard do you think it would be to support Metal either through MoltenVK, or through SPIR-V if Granite eventually supports it?

[Themaister]

8/16-bit storage is already supported, so that takes care about hard requirements. The shaders are very complex, so the likely hurdle is most likely meticulous testing. I don't have any Apple systems I care about getting parallel to run on, so this is not something I prioritize.

Granite will never get a Metal backend, but I had Granite up and running in MoltenVK in the past, but hasn't been tested since forever.

[AmigaAbattoir]

It looks like that there is now a Mac version of Vulkan. From MoltenVK GitHub page:

The recommended method for developing a Vulkan application for macOS is to use the Vulkan SDK.

The Vulkan SDK includes a MoltenVK runtime library for macOS.

[a-hurst]

@Themaister I looked through the Granite repo and found the commit adding basic MoltenVK support, do you remember what remaining issues (if any) there were? I have a new M1 machine I can try building everything with, just wondering about the size of the dragons that may await (so to speak).

[rcaridade145]

Hello.
I came across https://gitlab.com/aglab2/parallel-n64/-/commit/06537d463a4df5679ac615dc0d2ffc5f82ed26e4 used by https://gitlab.com/parallel-launcher/parallel-n64/-/merge_requests/15 . Is there any chance of this being used to add support for MacOS?

Thank you for your work.