Virtual Machines and pirated MacOS - Trying to publish my game to other platforms

When I purchased Gamemaker Studio 2: Desktop this December, I was jubliant that I could finally publish my games to other platforms! I was immediately let down by finding out that I had to own a computer with each OS to publish to it. 

My main focus was to publish to Mac. After a bit of research, I found out that a Virtual Machine may have been the solution to all my problems. At this point, I had no experiences with VMs. I downloaded Virtualbox, launched it, and tried to create a MacOS VM. 

I hadn't realised that you had to have a disk image to install any other OS. After I figured it out, I trawled the web looking for an .iso file for MacOS Catalina. I even downloaded the products of a few sites, but none of them worked to install MacOS into my Virtualbox. Finally, I gave up, switching focus to publishing to Ubuntu.

That wasn't easy for me either. I could start running the installation of Ubuntu from the .iso that I downloaded from their site, but it crashed every time, before the location selection screen. Every time, I increased the memory I was giving it by 100 MB and tried again. I finally managed to install a laggy Ubuntu at 1500 MB RAM. 

I went onto the Yoyo Games website and looked for the Ubuntu IDE download - only to find that there wasn't one. Testing and/or building on Ubuntu required you to install a bunch of dependencies and then connect to GMS2 over the internet. GMS2 asked for the IP address of the Ubuntu computer, and that was where it all broke down. 

Every IP address I inputted, GMS2 failed to connect. I tried the IP address of my physical computer, the IP address of my computer according to the WiFi hub, the IP address of the VM according to whatismyip.com, and more. I finally got the IP address from the Ubuntu Terminal, which turned out to be the necessary one, letting GMS2 interact with my Ubuntu VM.

When testing, GMS2 sends the project files to your Ubuntu computer using some sort of internet protocol, and your project runs within Ubuntu. I tested my game to find some dissuading results: the audio lagged behind the gameplay and Discord Rich Presence didn't work. 

Nevertheless, I built an Ubuntu .zip and posted it on the game's itch.io page. The devlog described how it was a bad ripoff of the original game. 

Today, I was playing a YouTube video through my Ubuntu VM when it suddenly struck me: the audio latency might have been caused by the Virtual Machine. To confirm this, I played the music video of Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up. The video short where Rick Astley claps in time to the music (0:12-0:14) was completely off, far ahead of the sound I was hearing. Feeling kind of stupid, I have to admit, I removed it from the bug list and started to wqrite this post....

You can download the Ubuntu/Windows versions of my project from the project page.