Alyssa Rosenzweig is known in the industry for leading the development of Panfrost, an open source, reverse-engineered driver project for the ARM Mali GPU. For nearly 2 years, she has worked with the Asahi Linux team to reverse engineer the Apple M1/M2 graphics. And now she shares her latest milestones.
Alisha successfully rendered the open-source game Neverball with the open-source Mesa “Asahi” driver. macOS systems currently use the standard, proprietary macOS kernel graphics driver, but now by running the OpenGL driver on macOS devices, it is possible to run Neverball is a simple OpenGL game that can now be run by running OpenGL driver on macOS devices.
Even so, Neverball’s operation on macOS is still limited by Mesa and lacks support for Apple’s official Cocoa windowing system, so Neverball is built for macOS with the X11 version of SDL2.
Today’s lengthy article by Alyssa Rosenzweig focuses on clip motion controls to make features work with the ongoing Mesa code on Apple Silicon graphics. In that article, there is an important comment.
"That said, thanks to the large amount of shared code in Mesa, I was able to do the basic OpenGL driver by myself. I see native OpenGL 2.1 on Asahi Linux by the end of this year. this is enough to speed up your desktop environment and browser. It's also enough to play old games like Neverball. Even without the fancy features, GPU acceleration means smooth animations and longer battery performance."
