I’m a bit upset that Adobe won’t update CS 6 to allow it to run on the latest macOS. I bought a few licenses of CS 6 when they came out with the subscription model because it had everything I needed. Now it won’t run. I suppose I could be mad at Apple too but as a software developer know how easy it is to support 64 bit. They can just rebuild their product with the latest toolset! Anyone else upset over this?
But then they couldn’t force you to go to the subscription model. 
It doesn’t help with hardware shipping with Catalina, but other hardware can be put back on Mojave so it can be used. Alternatively, a virtual machine can be used to run older stuff. I’m going to have to do that with Quicken.
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Can you actually virtualise a Mac in MacOS? I don’t have a Mac, but may get one next year.
Yes. All of the major VM products support MacOS when running on a mac.
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That’s good to know.
Yes, I built an older one in a VM for Quicken use. It works great. Perfect for using older necessary software.
It does sound just that easy, I know, but it’s far from it. Assuming some of the code is in C, you have problems like assuming the size of something. So say you’re representing a colour quad (a triple of RGB plus an alpha channel) in an 32 bit unsigned int. So you code unsigned int pxl = {some value} . Now you want to store that somewhere… so you write to a pointer, which you happened to choose to declare as void *ptr={some address} since it’s a void* you can’t apply a type checking rule. Now you write a 32 bit int to that pointer, and the code works great.
Now, many years later, you switch platforms. Now an unsigned int is assumed to be a 64bit value. Now when you put something into it, you’re storing 8 bytes instead of 4. And when you write it to memory, you end up overwriting 4 bytes you never meant to because when you coded the original code, you assumed the smaller size of an int.
Now, to be fair, there are coding practices that can help prevent these sorts of problems… but unfortunately it usually turns out that your inexperienced coders don’t learn these lessons until AFTER they learn the hard way… when it’s already too late for that old code base.
TL;DR You can’t simply just recompile 32 bit code that wasn’t properly designed into 64 bit code, and expect positive results.
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I thought Apple stopped supporting 32 bit programs a while back, like Catalina. That’s when my CS5 Photoshop stopped working. I kept an old Macbook around for years just for Photoshop and some Autodesk programs, until a niece needed it more than I did.
Yes, this thread has zombied back to life a year after it was originally posted.
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