After initially giving up on running Cubase 10 in Windows, I’ve been trying to find solutions to the deal-killer problem of tiny UIs for plugins that aren’t HDPI aware (practically all of them, in my case!)
The first workaround I came up with was to dust off Jbridge, which I haven’t used in many years, and run bridged plugins in external GUI mode. Despite requiring some clumsy extra clicks, this does work. It also seems that as long as the bridged versions are named identically (without added extensions), projects could be recalled with the original plugins without losing settings, if Steinberg come up with a fix later. However, I don’t know if there may be performance or stability issues under heavy load - I haven’t yet done a stress test. Is anyone still using Jbridge, under demanding conditions?
The second workaround is Windows Magnifier, an accessibility tool which I had never used before. With Magnifier running, Ctrl-Alt-mousewheel zooms in a portion of the screen. I have found it works surprisingly well once I got used to aiming the mouse pointer at the right place. The zooming in and out is a drag on workflow of course, but not nearly as much as I would have thought. The one significant downside is that the mouse pointer gets annoyingly laggy when zoomed in.
So neither of these solutions is perfect, but still might be good enough to work with, given that I’m trying to avoid having to buy a new Mac.
Any other possible solutions?
If I am correctly informed, the way to keep the proper size of non-HDPI aware plugins is to run them as a separate process, like Bitwig and Reaper apparently do. Given that Cubase used to have its own VST Bridge built-in, shouldn’t Steinberg already have the know-how to do this?