SoftPear is a user mode Mac OS X emulator for Linux. As the news on our site say, we have just released a Preview Release that can run some Mac OS X command line tools in Linux and FreeBSD. (The download includes the GPL’ed source, binaries for Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X, some test programs and a README.) We do this by with our Mach-O executable loader, PearPC’s PowerPC interpreter core, and our libc wrapper. We hope to be able to run the complete Mac OS X “Quartz” UI on Linux, FreeBSD and Darwin/x86 one day, this way.
This is a really interesting project. However, I wonder how long Apple will let them go on before stepping in with some legal threat. In theory I’d doubt apple would have any legs to stand on since people would need to buy/”borrow” a copy of Mac OS-X to run on a i386 machine. Still Apple could come out with reverse engineering stuff and DRM thingamajig.
Anyway good luck to these guys and to the PearPC guys, and keep up the good work.
“I’d doubt apple would have any legs to stand on since people would need to buy/”borrow” a copy of Mac OS-X to run on a i386 machine.”
They would just show them the the OS X license that states you can only install it on Apple hardware.
Anyway though, I’d like to see one of these work well. The challenge I think is not just making it fast enough, but also keeping up with Apple’s changes. 10.4 is bringing a newer Quartz, just as 10.2 and 10.3 did.
That license would do nothing to shut down the project, though – only people who use it. Besides, it sounds like a blatantly unenforceable proposition to me.
Just like pearpc, it will just make more people buy a mac.
“Just like pearpc, it will just make more people buy a mac.”
I think, it’s the Mac that makes more people use PearPC.
1) Hardware Tax
2) Expandibility Tax (new system).
Have you ever noticed:
1) Upgrading your system is like pulling teeth.
a) Try getting a Superdrive from Apple when your original machine didn’t come with one. Apple one sell one, for that you either go 3rd party which isn’t supported and could void your the warrantee.
b) How about a new video card? That calls for a new system in Apples eyes.
Unless Apple comes out w/their 500 dollar PC then this is a moot point.
2) Some people like the OS but not the hardware.
3) Deal with it.
But running OS X in emulation? What kind of experience are you actually looking for?
Well, softpear is potentially a great idea. It would definitely be faster than PearPC because Pear has to emulate the whole system and everything running on it. Softpear potentially will only really run Quartz/Aqua, probably finder and any Mac-exclusive titles one may want.
Its good because most people only really care about the eyecandy elements of OSX. This way, potentially, you could run all your linux apps natively on x86 while taking advantage of OSX’s compositor.
I still wonder a bit if the softPear team really knows what they are doing though. I also wonder if it wouldn’t be a lot smarter to just contribute to the existing projects related to Xorg and window managers that have built-in compositing. Its hard to believe, but linux isn’t far away from OSX-level eyecandy and animations. The groundwork is already laid.
the OSX licence says you can only install it onApple-branded hardware. Get the sticky Apple label off a scrapped powermac and stick it on your windows box and you’re legal
Seriously though, OS emulation is pretty lame especially onsidering the amount of OSX compatible hardware in the wild on eBay. I love my clamshell iBook….
Although if youd read the article you’d find this is an OSX runtime not a PPC Mac emulator and as such – like WINE – doesnt require a copy of the Mac operating system.
Nice try. If you’re paying $500 for a video card, you’re being ripped off. The MSRP for the GeForce 6800 GT is $499 and the recently released Radeon x800XT costs $499 as well.
Like I’ve already said. Nice try at the FUD. Do some research before posting some crap like that.
Whoops mean DMCA, not DRM. Anyhow I’ve never actually installed or used Mac OS-X (aside from a in store demo), so I’m clueless when it comes down to EULA’s on said OS.
As it is PPC emulators are still in their infant stage, if I wanted to run Mac OS-X I’d just go out and buy a secondhand PPC. Still that shouldn’t dicourage developers.
“2) Expandibility Tax (new system).”
Huh?
“Have you ever noticed:
1) Upgrading your system is like pulling teeth.”
Never had that problem.
“a) Try getting a Superdrive from Apple when your original machine didn’t come with one. Apple one sell one, for that you either go 3rd party which isn’t supported and could void your the warrantee.”
It won’t void your warranty because it’s in the manual, and buy one from either Pioneer or Sony, the companies Apple gets them from. It’s the same drive.
“b) How about a new video card? That calls for a new system in Apples eyes.”
I upgraded the one in my G5 without a problem. It plugged in right where the previous one did.
“Its good because most people only really care about the eyecandy elements of OSX. This way, potentially, you could run all your linux apps natively on x86 while taking advantage of OSX’s compositor. ”
On the contrary, I’ve found most people care much more about the applications than eye candy. It seems most people who don’t have a Mac care the most about OS X’s eye candy.
Why the hell would anyone wants to do that!!!
I am so poor but I got to have a MAC….NOT.
Why even bother? It’ll never get out of hobby stage.
Wine makes sense – Windows = a glut of software you need.
Pear ? – Mac’s ain’t got anything worth emulating left.
The dock has been reproduced natively (for KDE at least. See kde-apps.org) Finder behavior has been (infamously) reproduced in recent Gnome. We’ll have transparency and shadows work out of box in X in a few month…
What a waste of programming brains…
The project is interesting but I don’t really see the point. In a few days a low cost Mac is going to be unveiled (or not) and even running as a G4 its going to kick this project in regards to speed.
As far as Linux and MacOSX being the same, their not. Those assertions just aren’t true.
Then their is that other comment that you can’t install a third party SuperDrive in a Mac and again this is not true.
Just did it a few months ago using a Pioneer drive and Patchburn.
iMovie, iDVD, and Garage Band have no Linux equivalents. Period, end of sentence. They won’t for a while.
Moreover the author wrote his thesis on the topic – so I would say it has half a chance of making it somewhere. Also, really, if the author of this project wants to spend his free time on it what do you care? Are you worried he wont have time to help you get your “OMG AWSOME Drop Shadows in X!!” working?
Feeding the trolls, I know. Then again, what does responding to someone what could not be bothered to type “wh” say about me.
It will be interesting to see if the OSS community respects Apple’s intellectual property as they expect companies like Linksys to (who make routers based of GPL software and have violated that GPL license on occassion). Apple’s license (which isn’t crap outside of the United States and isn’t remidied by a sticker on your PC box) states the terms of how you are allowed to use their property just as the GPL states the terms under which you are allowed to use the property of those coders who have GPL’d it. Does the fact that you dislike Apple’s terms give you the right to violate them? Does the fact that linksys or any other company dislikes the terms of the GPL allow them to disregard it?
This is a two-way street whether people like to acknowledge it or not. Now, you might dislike Apple’s terms. That is fine. Frankly, I think that Apple is wrong to restrict their OS so much, but that is THEIR choice since OS X is THEIR property. I have the option of accepting or rejecting those restrictions, but if I reject the restrictions I am not allowed to use their software. As the FSF would say, while you are free to reject the license, the license is the only thing giving you the right to use the software.
Apple’s license (which isn’t crap outside of the United States and isn’t remidied by a sticker on your PC box) states the terms of how you are allowed to use their property just as the GPL
The SoftPear developers can always state that SoftPear is intended to by run on Macs running Linux on a x86 emulator.
“Wine makes sense – Windows = a glut of software you need”
– Emulating an OS that you can dual-boot on the same machine makes sense? Oh.. ok. We hate Windows, but we do want to run it’s software, huh? How hypocritical.
“Pear ? – Mac’s ain’t got anything worth emulating left.
The dock has been reproduced natively (for KDE at least. See kde-apps.org) Finder behavior has been (infamously) reproduced in recent Gnome. We’ll have transparency and shadows work out of box in X in a few month…”
– Oh dang. They copied the Dock, Finder and shadows. I guess you have a point there, buddy. How can we argue with that?
“What a waste of programming brains…”
– What a waste of board space…
” “They would just show them the the OS X license that states you can only install it on Apple hardware.”
Which means absolutley fekk all outside of the USA. :-P”
– Apple can sue your ass in most countries.
How did you get so brainwashed, btw?
Anonymous,
You’re posting on deaf ears. The majority of the people around here could careless about respecting any license thats not GPL and god forbid either makes them pay for software or pay for hardware to run the software.
If that’s how the developers want to hone their programming chops who are we to complain. I’d rather run OS X on a Mac but it’s really good that people are trying these things out.
1) because we can
2) because its wrong
GPL is enforceable because it lifts restrictions on copyright if you agree to certain conditions: discarding rights granted by the law is infinitely more defendable than what EULAs do which is attempt to extend what copyright can and cannot be used for beyond what is legally acceptable.
So yes the EULA means jack all. IANAL.
i wonder why evryone says that it is hard to uppgrade a mac.
mac must be one of the computers that is really easy to uppgrade.
i have an old powermac9600 with a 180mhz ppc i can simply by a g4 800mhz cpu for that machine try to do an uppgrade like that with a pc without swaping mobo and everything.
so if you want a machine that is good to uppgrade mac is the only way to go
My G3-300 B&W:
I’ve currently:
1) Formac Fast&Wide SCSI Controler
2) IBM 8G Fast&Wide SCSI Drive
3) Macally Keyboard
4) Kensington Trackball
5) Lacie Firewire400 48x12x48x CD-WR
6) Maxtor Firewire400 300G harddrive
7) 384MB ram.
I can do the following:
Memory: 2G 8x256MB PC100 or PC133 sticks (~$480.00)
Video: ATI Radeon 7000 32MB (!128.00)
CPU: G4 1.0GHz (~$400.00)
I can do just about as much with this system as I’ve been able to do with any of my x86 systems in the past.
At 300Mhz it still runs Mac OS X 10.3.7 well. The standard ATI RagePro video handles everything I’ve needed it to (1280×1024 @ 75Hz & 32bit color on a 19″ monitor).
“- Emulating an OS that you can dual-boot on the same machine makes sense? Oh.. ok. We hate Windows, but we do want to run it’s software, huh? How hypocritical.”
Couldn’t the same be said of people using OSS products on win32 platforms? Firefox anyone?
Also there’s a huge difference between a corporation violating Copyright laws and an individual violating the same laws. How can you even equate the two?
Well, x86 hardware is more upgradable than Mac hardware, admittedly. It’s a fact of life. But who the hell cares? How many consumers actually upgrade their hardware?
The ‘Macs can’t be upgraded’ partyline is a lame argument that’s only used by the three geeks that build their own computer (and proud of it), but has no merit in the real world. The world where people don’t even bother to put in additional RAM and just dispose of their PC after 4-5 years. The average consumer might have reasons not to buy a Mac, but hardware upgradability is not one of them.
And that’s not even taking laptops into account.
“Couldn’t the same be said of people using OSS products on win32 platforms? Firefox anyone? ”
Not true at all. You can use one platform/license and not dislike others, especially considering OSS has never been just a GNU/Linux thing. It’s on all platforms. Mozilla in particular has always done a great job supporting multiple platforms, not matter what the OS license is.
“Also there’s a huge difference between a corporation violating Copyright laws and an individual violating the same laws. How can you even equate the two?”
So what’s the difference? They are the same laws, as you said. And not being part of a corporation doesn’t put you above them.
OSS is predominantly a *nix thing. Sure some people have bothered to port their favorite software to new platforms, but that’s just a testiment to how platform agnostic most OSS is (unlike some other software). The poster implied that we (the OSS community) hate MS, personally I am indifferent towards MS. If MS were to crumble and die today another company would step up and take it’s place.
You’re right corporations under the eyes of the law usually have more rights than you or I. Still when a big corporation breaks the law it is not only them but also their customers (knowingly, or unknowingly) fsking over the hobbyist [sp?] programmer who spent so much time developing/debugging/testing a piece of code. Where if I were to do something illegal it would only be an individual breaking the law, still bad but not as bad as hundreds of thousand lusers.
“Couldn’t the same be said of people using OSS products on win32 platforms? Firefox anyone?”
– Not in my opinion. How is running a third party application for Windows on Windows hypocritical?
“Also there’s a huge difference between a corporation violating Copyright laws and an individual violating the same laws. How can you even equate the two?”
– I wasn’t comparing anything.
In any case, I was just replying to an individual I considered to be trolling.
“OSS is predominantly a *nix thing.”
I think that’s just a temporary thing, and that as Linux becomes more popular there will be more commercial software released for it, eventually slanting the proportions.
“Sure some people have bothered to port their favorite software to new platforms, but that’s just a testiment to how platform agnostic most OSS is”
That really implies that OSS was designed for *nix and *nix alone, with other platforms being an afterthought. Sticking with our Firefox example, Mozilla has gone to great lengths for multiplatform support (especially with Firefox), which is very important in the browser arena. It also shows that they tend to push standards and not platforms.
“(unlike some other software).”
Advantages and disadvantages of OSS vs. proprietary software is an entire debate on it’s own.
“The poster implied that we (the OSS community) hate MS, personally I am indifferent towards MS. If MS were to crumble and die today another company would step up and take it’s place.”
Agreed in full. All conspiracy theories aside, I don’t like MS simply because they put out bad software.
“You’re right corporations under the eyes of the law usually have more rights than you or I. Still when a big corporation breaks the law it is not only them but also their customers (knowingly, or unknowingly) fsking over the hobbyist [sp?] programmer who spent so much time developing/debugging/testing a piece of code. Where if I were to do something illegal it would only be an individual breaking the law, still bad but not as bad as hundreds of thousand lusers.”
How does either one damage a hobbyist programmer? If they release there code with no intention of profiting off it, it’s not really doing any damage. It’s still wrong, but it doesn’t hurt (don’t confuse that with me saying it’s okay). The damage is done when someone should be getting paid for their work, and isn’t. There are some proprietary applications out there that OSS doesn’t even come close to matching, and people stealing those are where major damage is done.
I must concede, iMovie, iDVD, and Garage Band are neat apps. But they are all linked into Apple’s patented/licensed/otherwise restricted by Apple proprietary codecs (QuickTime, Apple’s AAC implementation etc.).
These apps will never become completely functional on emulator… Worse, they will never become any remotly legal on emulator/unlicensed platform. No sane distro can ship Xine with all reversed codecs; forget Apple’s videoaudio stuff.
The last sad point about this is that Apple is not a software company. Adobe (Premiere), Macromedia (Director) and others (SoundForge, FrootyLoops) are eventually happy about their software running on any OS/Hardware. The second you make it easy to run Apple’s products on others’ hardware, you’ll have vultures outside of your door. They make money on hardware, not software. I wish good (legal) luck to project programmers.
…using this to run OS-X apps on Linux on Mac? This project provide the Mach-O loader, while GnuStep provides the libarys…
Apple has some good apps, especially for multimedia. It would be nice if people could try them before deciding to swith do Mac.
I think this is a great project and people into multimedia can all relate to it.
It looks like there isn’t too many people here that are in into multimedia.
first of all.. the AAC implementation is not proprietary…. second.. all those apps can use WAV, AIFF, MP3 and AAC (which again is not proprietary) and Fairplay encrypted AAC files.
second.. QuickTime is a media platform (one of the most rich media platforms in fact) and not some proprietary codec.
I hate to burst your bubble, but…
“the OSX licence says […]”
What? The EULA? Who said EULAs hold in court? Where is the proof?
i agree with Mike Hearn on this.
The SoftPear developers can always state that SoftPear is intended to by run on Macs running Linux on a x86 emulator.
The SoftPear developers don’t have to defend themselves at all. Its like with P2P applications. Don’t shoot the messenger. Just because it can be used to do illegal things, like a knife, doesn’t mean it was meant to be used solely for such purpose. In fact, an application which costs nothing BUT is proprietary is in the scope of a by default legal task to use.
Like with BitTorrent, Bram Cohen would say to defend BitTorrent: “But your honor, people are using it to legally distribute software” Is that true? Can you give me examples? “Oh, certainly your honor. This operating system called ‘Fedora’ by a corporation called ‘RedHat’ and this ‘WarCraft3 installer’ by a corporation called ‘Blizzard’.” Or is it your opinion we should ban cars, knifes, stones, electricity, humans because those ‘are used to do things not according to the law’.
I haven’t seen WINE being sued by Microsoft and i guarantee you Microsoft is aware of WINE. I haven’t seen Intel sueing DEC over fx32 either. Also, assume $USER has a POWER or PPC with e.g Linux or *BSD then he/she can have e.g. a Photoshop MacOSX/PPC license *and* run that application, with a license, on their prefered OS. Perfectly legal i’d say. Question is wether it runs well or not though.
Assuming it works well enough, what do people evade by that? The Apple tax (software and/or hardware). Who don’t like it? The Apple fans. Surprise, surprise. I wouldn’t be afraid though; for now this project is far from ready.
Emulating an OS that you can dual-boot on the same machine makes sense? Oh.. ok. We hate Windows, but we do want to run it’s software, huh? How hypocritical.
Backwards compatibility, several economic reasons, lack of native applications, proprietary or license issues are solid examples of why one would prefer WINE or CrossOver. Clearly, with nonsense like that, you do not understand the slightest of these concepts, or you don’t want to get from your high horse…
They copied the Dock, Finder and shadows.
But Apple ripped off the concept ‘CPU’. That’s unoriginal! Everything which is new is (partly) based on old and Apple can’t patent everything. As for shadows and transparancy in GUI, those were not Apple inventions at all. Several aspects from OSX come from NEXTSTEP/OpenStep as well, which you have never ran.
IOW if you can’t stand the heat then get your ass on Macfreak.nl where you find people who have the exact opinion as you.
A lot of OS X came from NeXTStep. They bought the company to get the OS, after all. What’s your point?
If you believe that OS X is not original because it uses NeXT technologies, you’re correct. OS X is NeXT with a far better UI and some actual applications. And backwards compatibility with Classic Mac apps. And a market. And a large hardware base. What it isn’t is a *copy* of NeXT. It *is* NeXT.
“Assuming it works well enough, what do people evade by that? The Apple tax (software and/or hardware). Who don’t like it? The Apple fans. Surprise, surprise. I wouldn’t be afraid though; for now this project is far from ready.”
You really had something going up until that point. Why would someone with a Mac care either way if there’s a way to emulate OS X? They can already run it, and without any issues.
“What it isn’t is a *copy* of NeXT. It *is* NeXT.”
Was NeXT. It’s got a lot of both MacOS and NeXTStep in it, among other things. 10.3 was the first one to really branch off from reimplementing features from previous OS’s.
Mozilla is really an anomoly in the OSS community, since it came from a commercial background where they ported to various platforms establishing themselves as the king of the hill before being overthrown by the IE-Win32 bundles. Mozilla being portable was more a business decision than anything else. I only used it as an example since Win32 fanatics are prone to flame anything OSS related.
And OSS is not *nix and *nix only it is designed to be as platform agnostic as possible, at least I know most my software is designed that way. In away you are partially right, that Win32/Mac ports are sort of an afterthought, since developers usually develop for their immediate platform (that being *nix).
As for the Individual v. Corportation shpill. As a hobbyinst developer I can tell you that I do not develop with profit in mind, but more to scratch an itch and try to keep my brain nice in limber on my offtime. If X-Corp. were to take a piece of your hardwork and weren’t to give credit where credit is due, I’m sure you would feel as pissed off as anyone else. Now if some kid from Sweden were to take your work and just paste it into your home work, well I know I wouldn’t even wanna be involved in that mess. :^)
Sorry for the errors, it should read “paste it into his home work”. I wish OSnews would add an edit option to their comment section.
You really had something going up until that point. Why would someone with a Mac care either way if there’s a way to emulate OS X? They can already run it, and without any issues.
Obviously some Mac owners care, otherwise they would not read and react here, ehh?
You’re right that part was a quite subjective, perhaps offensive part of my post, yet i think its a slammed nail. What i meant was jealousy/envy. If the masses are able to run (parts of) ‘Apple’ (MacOSX, POWER/PPC, Mac applications) while evading the price tag that involves for then they pay less for it than an Apple equip. owner had to. For now, the masses are not able to do this, and this application won’t allow it for the masses in the short term.
Its the same with the fact every middleclasser can own a ‘sports car’ these days. In the early 90s it was still ‘cool’, ‘nerdy’, and ‘wow’ to own a computer (or PC). Now its ‘normal’. Other example is Windows and the demise of UNIX. Another example is plasma tv’s. A few years ago, very expensive, but nowadays they’re getting cheaper (i doubt the quality, but thats another story). Its the motion of a top-down marketing strategy going from top to down and it is unevadable with every product in tech field, unless it uses bottom-top strategy (e.g. service, like cable/DSL, use that strategy). Either that, or the product is gone (that is to say, when the corporation builded a product with which they specialized into a certain field). Funny thing to note is that it seems that with $500 computers -although rumors- Apple is showing the initiative on this one. Heck, and i actually feel with their standpoint since i’ve experienced similar situations in my life, on other products.
As for NEXTSTEP (current correct name), wasn’t there some video around here of a corporation who’s still programming on it? And releasing a new OS release some time soon? I remember a few videos being posted here… in any case i meant the original NEXTSTEP/OpenStep before Jobs got bought out and i meant it rather as example/principle.
Jack –
“Mozilla is really an anomoly in the OSS community, since it came from a commercial background where they ported to various platforms establishing themselves as the king of the hill before being overthrown by the IE-Win32 bundles. Mozilla being portable was more a business decision than anything else. I only used it as an example since Win32 fanatics are prone to flame anything OSS related.”
I was only using your example. But I don’t think Mozilla is an anomaly. Usually the user oriented OSS does start out on Linux, but there are many many projects being developed with multiple platforms in mind, especially on the server front. Remember, OSS doesn’t just refer to basic applications.
“As for the Individual v. Corportation shpill. As a hobbyinst developer I can tell you that I do not develop with profit in mind, but more to scratch an itch and try to keep my brain nice in limber on my offtime. If X-Corp. were to take a piece of your hardwork and weren’t to give credit where credit is due, I’m sure you would feel as pissed off as anyone else. Now if some kid from Sweden were to take your work and just paste it into your home work, well I know I wouldn’t even wanna be involved in that mess. :^)”
If I were developing for free, of course I would be pissed off if I didn’t get credit, which is one of the reasons it’s still wrong, but it wouldn’t do any damage. I have a nice job as a media developer, and a lot of that is writing server applications, and as a commercial developer it would do a lot of damage for someone to use my code and not pay me for it, individual for corporation.
dpi –
I really don’t see jealousy or envy anywhere. Not many people run an emulated OS as their main OS, especially if it’s for a different architecture. As an OS X user, I’m more upset that people aren’t going to get a full experience through emulation. I don’t look forward to seeing articles and posts by people claiming how horrible OS X is when they haven’t used it in full.
About the top-down strategy, I don’t doubt that at all. But to look at it from another point of view, Apple was big before hardware became a commodity, and by keeping their OS to themselves they’ve suffered the consequences. But now that hardware has been a commodity for a while, Apple may just now be able to comfortably take advantage of that while still keeping their OS in house. In other words, hardware becoming a commodity first gave an advantage to hardware companies (and in turn the company smart enough to take advantage of that…MS), and now that advantage is coming to an end as the effects are reaching the hardware/software companies (Apple). I’ve never been a fan of Apple releasing a low end computer, but if they plan to do it, now would be the best time, while they have the interest of iPod owning PC users, while Windows is screwing itself on the security front, and while the supposedly have an office suite in the works. Combine all of that and you have a definite competitor in the business arena. But hey, this could easily end up being a media center, which could also be very cool. Or we could be getting all worked up over nothing (in which case Think Secret can go screw themselves).
“As for NEXTSTEP (current correct name), wasn’t there some video around here of a corporation who’s still programming on it? And releasing a new OS release some time soon? I remember a few videos being posted here… in any case i meant the original NEXTSTEP/OpenStep before Jobs got bought out and i meant it rather as example/principle.”
Even though OpenStep doesn’t perform so well on current hardware, that would still be very interesting to see.
“individual for corporation” should be individual *or* corporation. Sorry.
“Emulating an OS that you can dual-boot on the same machine makes sense? Oh.. ok. We hate Windows, but we do want to run it’s software, huh? How hypocritical”
– Apparently I struck a nerve with that line. Sorry folks.
“IOW if you can’t stand the heat then get your ass on Macfreak.nl where you find people who have the exact opinion as you”
– No thanks. I’m not a big-happy-family kind of guy.
This is a really interesting project. However, I wonder how long Apple will let them go on before stepping in with some legal threat. In theory I’d doubt apple would have any legs to stand on since people would need to buy/”borrow” a copy of Mac OS-X to run on a i386 machine. Still Apple could come out with reverse engineering stuff and DRM thingamajig.
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No. It’s not interesting. It looks like the same bunch of losers who ran around hyping the slow,useless Mac Emulators which they ran on the Amiga have found a new toy to play with.
Sigh.
To be passing down judgements on this project. Apparently Mac users feel threatened by this otherwise there wouldn’t be so much bitching and moaning about it.
To be passing down judgements on this project. Apparently Mac users feel threatened by this otherwise there wouldn’t be so much bitching and moaning about it.
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Sorry. I own an Amiga 2000. Those Software Mac Emulators for the Amiga ran like crap on the 2000 when actually put under stress.
You can pretty much expect this Mac OS X Emulator to do the same thing on a PC.
An interesting thought.
Not many people run an emulated OS as their main OS, especially if it’s for a different architecture.
The emulator aspect was already there. Its called QEMU. This application rather is similar to WINE which is a different beast (Windows API implementation) and not an emulator. Hence the application discussed here is rather similar to DarWine which allows one to run Windows applications on MacOSX without a Windows copy (hence neither a license is necessary). DarWine basically uses QEMU and WINE.
The fact its meant for a different architecture itself doesn’t say very much and is partly untrue. That is to say, there are very fast virtual machines/emulators. E.g. QEMU is rather fast; Bochs not so. Actually you do have a point, because emulating POWER on x86 is hard to do and means several problems but that doesn’t make it impossible or so.
Also, its possible to run this application on POWER itself; if done then there is no architecture or processor emulated hence no QEMU or so is necessary or used. That platform could be e.g. Pegasos, AmigaOne, IBM’s ?-series (AIX), Linux/*BSD and who knows what else. If this application in question is fast enough (and e.g. WINE proofs it can be) then the overhead of emulating the POWER architecture is neglated.
(I’m seeing PowerPC as a superset of POWER and hence don’t call it a ‘different architecture’.)
As an OS X user, I’m more upset that people aren’t going to get a full experience through emulation. I don’t look forward to seeing articles and posts by people claiming how horrible OS X is when they haven’t used it in full.
I sincerely doubt that someone who uses WINE, !fx32, or linux_emul (e.g. *BSD) would say they’re having a bad OS experience for they run a native OS with a ‘glue’ instead. They’re not running nor emulating a whole new OS by using these applications. Those who are aware of what they’re running at least wouldn’t say so and if they were the fact remains that the problem could lie in various aspects (including a problem in the actual program runned through the ‘glue’).
In any case, such should be pointed out by the application developers and their distributors. Ie. “we’re potentially not flawless”.
The application i was speaking about for DEC Alpha was ofcourse FX!32.