Windows 11 ARM runs blazing fast when virtualized on the M1 Mac. The best Windows machine is ironically a Mac. Only problem is...its Windows 11 :/

I think Windows 10 ARM images are floating around but it seems like Microsoft has discontinued them.

Wish there was a way to properly virtualize Windows 7 or just to even see earlier Windows OS run in this M1 environment.

in that combination, can I run all those cool indie games on Steam that are Windows only? or are they really x86 windows only? for some reason I was just hoping they only needed some APIs from Direct X instead of actual architecture

Parallels on M1 will run many games well, and some near perfectly. There's also Wine / Crossover which does better on some games and worse on others. If you had both, you could probably run the majority of Windows games out there.

Apple Gaming Wiki has a list of games and gives a general idea of how they perform. Reddit's /r/macgaming is also helpful.

https://www.applegamingwiki.com/wiki/Home

oh wow, alright! lots of AAA titles there, I have been getting some mobile ads about games and they all turned out to be indie PC games, which was disappointing because they are mostly sidescrollers. I'm getting optimistic that these less demanding games will work well on at least one of these environment simulators, but I guess it depends on the APIs they rely on.

I'm going to guess that 99.9% of games ship x86 executables / dlls. Even if the developers used something like PyGame, the code is compiled before distribution.

Games are x86 only but Windows has emulation so they should work.