Parallels

There is no 32-bit application support with any application run from a Parallels guest on an Apple Silicon Mac. Parallels must obey the 64-bit application requirement of the host operating system. The last version of macOS that supported 32 and 64-bit applications was macOS Mojave 10.14.6, and that should be your guide in choosing older Mac hardware: macOS Mojave - Technical Specifications - Apple Support

You can still get get the full Mojave installer for the approved hardware at How to download and install macOS - Apple Support but cannot download it to any Mac that shipped with a later operating system.

Then, the question of whether Parallels still offers the older versions of its VM for Mojave (or older), or if the much older free version of Parallels will show up in that operating system app store.

rjpesb wrote:

I have tried in vain to find a soultion to run a 32bit Mac OS on a M1 machine with Paralels 20 or even 13 or 14 so that I could run some 32bit apps and it just seems impossible.

Virtual machines get their speed by running most of the code in the guest machine natively, on the host processor. This is only possible if the guest is built for the same type of machine code as the host. So,

• On Intel Macs, Parallels VMs can only run Intel guests.
• On Apple Silicon Macs, Parallels VMs can only run ARM guests.

None of the versions of Mac OS X / macOS that can run 32-bit Intel applications had (public) ARM versions – and therefore, none of them will run inside Parallels virtual machines on Apple Silicon Macs.

If you were thinking of using Rosetta 2 and old versions of Parallels Desktop to get around this, that will not work. Rosetta 2 does not support "Virtual Machine apps that virtualize x86_64 computer platforms.

About the Rosetta Translation Environment | Apple Developer Documentation

It seems that the 64bit Mac just won't tolerate any 32bit operations. Am I correct or is there a reasonable solution? I've also looked at UTM and that seems way to complicated and the results apparently are extremely slow even if it does work.

UTM can set up a virtual machine or run code in emulation. Unfortunately, running an entire OS under emulation involves lots of overhead, and it's not clear that UTM can emulate Mac hardware enough to make running macOS feasible at all.

rjpesb wrote:

So apparently if I had been running Mojave I might have had a solution to the 32 vs 64 bit app problems. But once I am operating in the 64 bit area I cannot get Mojave to be able to load it to Parallels. So again it looks like the only viable solution for runing the 32 bit apps is to have a 32bit Mac runing Mojave or earlier.

If you had an Intel-based Mac running Catalina or later, you might be able to run Mojave or earlier as a guest OS inside of a Parallels virtual machine. I don't know, offhand, whether that would work or not.

But you have an Apple-Silicon-based Mac … and the only versions of macOS built for ARM are Big Sur, Monterey, Ventura, Sonoma, and Sequoia. Those are the only versions of macOS which could possibly be Parallels guests, and none of them support 32-bit applications.

rjpesb wrote:

So apparently if I had been running Mojave I might have had a solution to the 32 vs 64 bit app problems. But once I am operating in the 64 bit area I cannot get Mojave to be able to load it to Parallels. So again it looks like the only viable solution for runing the 32 bit apps is to have a 32bit Mac runing Mojave or earlier.

The Mac does not need to be 32-bit. Apple moved from 32-bit Intel processors to 64-bit Intel processors a very, very long time ago. You don't want to look for an Intel Mac that is so ancient that it has only a 32-bit processor – the 64-bit processors are capable of running both 32-bit and 64-bit code, IF the operating system supports it.

Snow Leopard (10.6) through Mojave (10.14) support both 32-bit and 64-bit applications. Catalina (10.15) pulled the plug on the 32-bit ones.