I use GOG to play “classic” old games so all are mainly 32bit. I know MacOS Catalina takes away 32bit support but I was hoping GOG foreseen this and would update/fix/workaround this to allow us still to play old games.

I read somewhere that DosBox had been updated to run on Catalina to allow 32bit games. Is this what GOG uses? Or could it? I bought and used GOG for the be ease of use and catalogue of games. Should I just now put them in the digital bin? Will this ever be fixed?

Would have been nice if GOG had at least emailed me and told me this, and asked if still wanted to keep buying games that they know would potentially stop working for me very soon.

DOSBox games have likely been updated to use the 64-bit DOSBox (and if not, you can probably do it yourself, install the 64-bit version and run them through that, with the existing config files). Newer games, as in actual Mac games (no idea where the threshold is, for Windows it's mid/late 90s), are quite an issue, and highly doubt there's anything GOG can do about it. For Windows they have always said actual 16-bit Windows games are an impossible ask until someone will come up with a Win 3.x emulator since they'd never work on 64-bit. Now for Mac that just expanded to 32-bit games as well, and it's nothing to do with GOG, it's entirely Apple's call. And what GOG did was stop selling 32-bit Mac games, if you look on the game pages you'll see that many no longer list Mac, and those are the 32-bit-only ones. So basically if you still want to play them, you need to keep an older OS version around. Again, entirely Apple's problem, nothing GOG can do about it.

PS: That removal of Mac is actually quite an odd move from GOG. They should have simply listed in the requirements that it's 32-bit only and supports only up to 10.14. Like for example if a Windows game doesn't work on 10 it's still sold as a Windows game, just doesn't have 10 listed under supported OS version. Think there are even a few games that don't even support 7 and they're still sold. Or those that are the opposite, now there's at least one requiring 10, and many requiring 64-bit so won't work for those still on 32-bit. But they still work on some version of Windows so they're still sold for Windows users, and as long as it's clearly specified that's just fine. They should do the same for Mac...

So can I just use DosBox 64bit and use the download from GOG to play them? Sorry I don’t really know how to, it’s why I joined GOG as the interface etc was great and had games from yesteryear that I wanted to play again.

If so then that’s fine for now until GOG maybe look into a solution themselves. I just thought as I bought the games from GOG I would have to run them via GOG as well.

Surely others have this problem as well and use a Mac? Anyone comment on what you do?
Thanks

For DOS games, theoretically yes. Not sure whether there are any that have compatibility issues with that, thinking there shouldn't be, but don't actually know.
For actual Mac games, obviously not. GOG won't have a solution for actual 32-bit Mac games any more than they can have a solution for 16-bit Windows games. Out of their hands.

See some discussion of options and why they're unlikely in another thread I could quickly find. Run them via GOG? You mean Galaxy? No idea about that. I'm here for games being fully DRM-free, which also means no client, won't touch the thing. (Was also here for flat pricing, equally with the DRM free thing, but they gave up on that...) But either way, Galaxy can be a launcher, but won't make the game more compatible with a system. In fact may reduce compatibility with some...

DOSBox only runs DOS games unless you install Windows 3.x in it to run Windows 3.x games.

To run 32bit Mac games your best bet is a dual-boot or mabye they'll function under virtualization but really if you are going to dual-boot you'd be better off dual-booting with Windows and running the games there.

Not sure why 16bit Windows games are being mentioned since GOG doesn't sell any but if you want to run them without installing Windows you can use boxedwine.or winevdm (doesn't support Mac)

I mentioned them because it's a similar situation, the OS maker decided to completely eliminate backwards compatibility with that and nothing GOG can do about it on their own. Just that Windows version that didn't run 16-bit already existed when GOG appeared, so as you say they never sold any, while the Mac situation just appeared now.

I would say it depends on the game. Removing compatibility from an OS is not an easy thing to bypass. You cannot no longer run actual DOS programs in Windows 10 64bit because the compatibility is not there. If MS removed all 32bit compatibility from Windows those users would have this same issue. I think it was stupid of Apple to remove it but this is their ecosystem and we play in it. I created a volume for Mojave and used a USB installer of it to add Mojave on it and it is now a second boot option. Some games this can be mitigated overall without having to waste space for another MacOS.