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Emulator Maker Rants About Microsoft & Apple
hojo writes: "There's a good (somewhat long) discussion from Darek Mihocka at this link to Emulators.com describing his problems dealing with trying to emulate Macs on buggy Windows operating systems. He gives a nice dissertation regarding why he think Mac OS X is a Bad Idea (TM), how Intel has screwed up with their marketing-driven engineering, and how Microsoft has impeded his ability to get things done with the introduction of new bugs in Win Me. He's a brilliant programmer and worth listening to--one of the greatest assembly language wizards out there, period."
- Color calibration. This is very obvious but what the hey. 1.8 gamma works very well- gamma correction is global throughout the OS and not just confined to an app or two (the calibration instructions for Photoshop on Windows involve, among other things, opening an image in IE and the same image in Photoshop and adjusting them until they match! WTF?)
- Applications. There's an awful lot of cheesy little GFX and audio and midi apps out there for Mac. Some of the cheesiest ones are the best ones. There's been a lot of little flybynight companies making amazing things for Mac and vanishing. I still have some of those products and they still kick butt. First one that comes to mind is HVS Color- a bizarre color reduction Photoshop plugin that has a formidably geeky control panel letting you weight the algorithms various ways. There's 'Megalomania', a really old MIDI patch-bay program that lets you do really nutty things like patch every other note through feedback delay pitch shifters with random velocity changes
:) I make frequent use of SoundEffects 0.9.2 (dunno if it ever reached 1.0!) which is a fantastic digital audio editor that has some wild bandpass/cut filters for it and is a whole audio workshop for free download. So much of this is wacked in some way and yet, how cool it is and how useful it can be...
- Stability. No, I don't mean 'not crashing' more's the pity- put it this way. I only very recently got a CD-R and began making backups of my critical files. Why? Because I knew enough about patching together working MacOSes that I honestly felt the machine could not die in such a way that I lost data. (Doh!) The funny part is, when a partition _did_ eat itself so severely that all the files went bye-bye, I freaked for a minute, then went in with Unerase and salvaged all the 'resource' files: which happened to contain _all_ the 'clipping' files that I'd been keeping important notes in. Every last one! And later I dropped them all on a creator-type-changer app and turned them all right back into clippings again and they all work as if nothing had happened. I am, needless to say, seriously sold on using clippings to keep important bits of textual data in now
:)
- Related: repairability. Most of the Mac graphics people have actually learned as much voodoo as they'd need to run Linux- it's just different sorts, just enough to be able to maintain their own machines in all emergencies. A guy charging a lot to do GFX work on a Mac might still have it crash on him but very likely can recover from just about anything in less than three to six hours. If you're on deadline that's very important. This is something Linux can offer as well as it also lends itself to being maintained by the user (given a pro user).
- Built-in functionality: I'm on an older powermac. Having built-in SCSI is probably why I got stupid and believed my disks could not die
;) it also does a great job doing demanding audio or video capture stuff. The audio circuitry gets very close to Digi third-party boards- it's quite a ways beyond Sound Blaster levels, must be using better ADCs or something.
- Damn near realtime capabilities- this is the flip side of the well known Mac lack of PMT. If the menu doesn't respond to your click, oh how tiresome. However, if the menu doesn't respond to your click because you're doing _midi_ sequencing and to run system tasks would make a MIDI event happen many milliseconds late- that's very different. If you've ever sequenced on a Mac so slow that it takes 10 seconds to not even completely redraw the screen- meantime pumping out hard, solid, perfectly timed MIDI information to your synthesizers- then you'll understand. I now have an older 68040 mac dedicated to MIDI. It's overkill
:) by the same token, on the Powermac demanding video or audio capture is a cinch- it just freezes up the machine until it's done. CD burns, ditto- all these sorts of things essentially say 'I am realtime priority!' and seize the machine to make sure they don't have a single bobble. Which is surely annoying- but if they _are_ super high priority, then those processes are right.
- Fun stupid stuff: I noticed that the GIS crew have already put 'Gravite' on their audio workstation Mac. It's a control panel that makes icons dangle under your pointer when you pick them up. Also you can fling them using a hotkey and if you let go the key as it hits the trash, it actually places the icon in the trash! I'm currently running Kaleidoscope and Smoothtype (extremely heavy theming and antialiasing, respectively- heavy theming means the designs can be entirely ludicrous and fanciful) which are quite good at dispelling the relentless sameness of MacOS. There's lots of other interface hacks, some dreadful and fatal and others innocuous. All can be installed and uninstalled just by dragging icons around and rebooting- when I lost the HD it was after something like two years of relentless hammering and altering on the same system, without ever starting afresh. I understand Windows boxes slow to a crawl after a couple years of continuous use with lots of installing and altering and breaking and fixing
:)
Ok, that was _way_ more than you ever wanted to know. I'd just like to confirm this complaining emulator writer in one thing- if you get a mac get an old one on eBay! Never assume that you must upgrade upgrade upgrade- you're better off identifying stuff that you want to do and building a system around it. Most software that's worth a crap _won't_ make you change or patch your system- if it tries, get rid of it, run Macsbug and if it installs stuff and says 'Reboot now (OK)' and there's no 'no, that's not OK!' button, cackle and hit 'cmd-power' and drop into the low level debugger and go 'es' (escape to shell) and get rid of whatever got added.But I digress. Anyhow you can probably get an entire mac for less than he'd be selling that emulator for :) try 7500/7600/8500/8600/9500/9600 on ebay, that was a good line. No performas ;)
I don't really understand why this is news or why it is even a big deal. If some emulator writer is having difficulty writing emulators on or for Macs or Wintel boxes, it isn't the fault of MSFT, Apple or Intel but instead it is his fault for basing his business on the whims of third party companies whose business decisions he has no control over.
The author goes on and on blaming other companies for assumptions that he makes, instead of correctly realizing that the basing business decisions on the behavior of others who are not under your control or whom at least you do not have direct access to is folly of the highest order. Blaming the architecture of Mac OS X and Windows Millenium is a coward's way out. The truth is Apple and MSFT are under no obligation to make their Operating System's easy for Joe Random Hacker to emulate.
Apple and MSFT have specifically rewritten their new Operating Systems to target the problems that have been leveled at them in the past (multitasking in Apple's case, instability in MSFT's case) and did not and should not have considered whether the improvements to their Operating Systems suddenly make emulation software more difficult to write.
I couldn't have said it better myself, although I've tried before.
I'm not surprised considering how much of the article was filled with FUD and uninformed nonsense.
This guy's speed claims are just so much bunk. The same guy who claims that his emulator will run at the same speed as a real Power Mac G4 claims that Windows NT runs just fine on a 486/33. Whatever. Anyone who has actually seen this tried knows what a joke it is. I'm sure, though, if you're used to emulating machines that were already slow, then you're used to sluggishness.
The reason why Apple dumped support for legacy Macs with Mac OS 8.0 was because of the continuation of attempts to scrape out all the m68k code from the OS. Mac OS 8.0 was the first version of the Mac OS to have a 100% PowerPC-native Finder. Apple had warned that when the Mac OS hit 8.0 (originally as Copland) that m68k machines would no longer be supported. Users knew that this was coming. Even though Mac OS 8.0 didn't do all that Copland promised, the timeline for m68k obsolecence was well-known in the day.
The move to cut off the clones in Mac OS 8.0 was an unfortunate necessity. The clones were devouring Apple's revenue, and the move to open up the Mac market to clones honestly should've never been made. Apple should've looked hard at just how much influence IBM has over the PC market before doing that. However, this was yet another bone-headed move from the Scully administration that Amelio and Jobs had to clean up.
I remember. I was there.
His claims about Mac OS X show just how uninformed he is. The claims of sluggish, broken emulation in the Classic layer have been refuted by many who have actually had experience with the system. (A few apps, oddly enough, act more responsively under Classic in Mac OS X than in Mac OS 9.0.4 itself!) The only real things that are broken in Classic are those that require raw access to the hardware below the system or that muck about in areas of the system that they shouldn't be.
Well, good! That's a modern OS doing its job. Those kinds of application need to be replaced with better written ones. Too much backwards compatibility for people who refuse to modernize their code is the bane of Windows and the x86 processor family.
Also he whines about memory requirements without fully considering the fact that Mac OS X Beta is Beta! It's not the trimmed and optimized final version that will be shipping. The 128 MB requirement, with 192 MB suggested, is probably not the final system requirements. Most of the reason for this huge requirement is the Classic environment. Yes, that's right. Mac OS X requires huge amounts of RAM because it runs an emulator. You didn't think that they could emulate an OS that allows unprotected access into low global system memory without allocating it its own memory space to work with, did you?
The very suggestion that Mac OS X won't run on the machines it was promised to is bull. There isn't a G3 or G4 based machine that can't get up to 128 MB of RAM today. Even the old revision A iMacs can get up to 384 MB with 2 SO-DIMM sockets. The G3 system with the least RAM expandability is the first G3 PowerBook. It can only go up to 160 MB, well within Apple's requirements. Even iBooks can get 320 MB of RAM.
"Oh, no. I don't have enough RAM in my machine. It must be obsolete! Damn Apple and their evil marketing. Now I have to buy a whole new machine." Come on! Upgrading a 3 year old machine to run Mac OS X is less than $300 for most people. That's nothing in the PC world. Try running Windows 2000 on an average machine from 3 years ago. It's not going to be very usable. Apple is making a suggestion for having a usable system. Wait, I forgot. "NT 4.0 works on a 486." Riiiight...
That brings me to his claims that no one has to upgrade their machines in the PC world. That's perfectly true. You don't have to run the latest version of Windows or Office. You don't have to run the latest games. You don't have to run anything that didn't come out within 1-2 years of your PC purchase. You might want to, but system requirements in the PC world have followed Moore's law more than CPUs themselves. It isn't until the past two years or so when most software started to only require a 233 MHz Pentium II or higher. The higher cost of PC maintenance is a well-known phenomenon. Even average home users upgrade at least 1 or 2 components of their system per year.
Finally, thank you, Slashdot, for this article. For once I can be proud, and say "This is news for nerds! This is stuff that matters!" How often does that happen? Well, not nearly enough.
This wasn't news. The only news involved is that he's pitching a hissy-fit and giving up on his product. This was just a little uniformed rant that happened to agree with your opinions. Considering the kind of articles you've griped at in the past, I'm not surprised you consider an open flame full of anti-Mac half-truths and FUD to be newsworthy.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The point (I believe) was that those actions are bad because they constitute a hardware upgrade treadmill that breaks compatibility and limits choice.
What's funny about this statement is that companies are constantly stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to backwards compatibility. Intel's x86 architecture is primarily flawed due to it's support of legacy crap. MSFT's operating systems were largely unstable due to supporting legacy 16-bit applications as well as shitty third party drivers.
Yet when these companies make a clean break and design a new architecture that works better, people like you start to scream about how they are gouging the consumer by not supporting all sorts of brain dead legacy crap.
I guess that goes to show that you can't please everyone.
From reading the article, it looks like the author hasn't even used the Mac OS X public beta yet, so in my mind, has very little room to criticize it. Comments from the article:
Apple is doing it again. By raising the bar so high - you need a minimum of a 128 megabyte G3 or G4 based Mac just to run Mac OS X
That's what you need to run the beta. I think the goal for 1.0 is 64MB. And unlike some other company's stated minimum requirements, these are actually realistic. I've had 6-10 apps (some Classic) open all day today, and the machine didn't flinch (which is vast departure from DP4). I have a Blue G3/400 with 128MB of RAM. It's not horribly old system, but even a G4/350 (not a typo) is faster.
You're cut off. In talking to Apple reps today I learned that the 128 megabyte limit is a bare bones minimum that even they don't recommend. 192 megabytes is the practical minimum.
All I can say is this isn't my experience (though, again it was with DP4).
The beauty of PCs, and why I feel Windows ultimately won out over Mac OS in the mass market despite sleazy underhanded marketing by both Apple and Microsoft, is that PCs don't go obsolete every 2 years! Any given PC can run a wide range of DOS and Windows releases.
This statement is really ironic is so many ways. But let's focus on one point. The reason that old PCs can run new versions of Windows (95/98/Me) is that Windows/DOS itself is old. So are the processors that power them (x86). The only real improvements have been end-user features. The same is the case on the Mac side of the world. Up until Mac OS 8.5 and 9, very little had changed in the system itself. I once heard an ex-Apple engineer joke that in the years since he left the company, the employee directory had changed more than the API documentation.
Mac OS X is a huge leap forward. Spend some time with the system and you'll understand. If you want the same basic infrastructure on less hardware, download Darwin (PPC or x86). If you want all the fancy extras, you need hardware to power it. Mac OS X has to emulate Classic as a matter of everyday life. That's no simple task, and it requires some ram to do it.
Is the hardware that Apple supports for Mac OS X a bit steep? Yes. But bear in mind Apple also cares about something called user experience. Microsoft may list a 486 processor on their box as a reasonable minimum. But even if it installs/boots on such hardware, you ain't gonna be a happy person. Apple wants the people who purchase Mac OS X to have a positive experience. This may mean not "supporting" older, more quirky hardware, even though the OS may still install on it.
BTW: I had a Pentium 166 that tried to run Windows 95 and some games on it (Total Annihilation, Quake II) on it. It wasn't pretty.
And people leave and the Mac market shrinks. They use some fancy advertising to win people back.
Please. Apple's engineering group alone has done amazing things in the last three years. Give credit where credit is due.
I predict a mass exodus of Mac users as a result of the arrogant and irresponsible policy Apple has created for Mac OS X. Poor backward compatibility for old apps.
Huh? Classic works remarkably well. In fact, it really sets new standards in emulation (it helps to be on the same native processor). Virtually all apps run, except those that require low-level hardware access. Apple has gone to great extents to be backwards compatible. Look what it did with Carbon. With Carbon did 90% of the work for porting ancient Mac apps to Mach. That's amazing stuff. Rhapsody was not slated to do this, btw, which is why it was a Bad Idea.
Added to the insult of having to pay to beta test.
Nobody's holding a gun to his head.
I just installed the Mac OS X public beta yeterday, and it is an amazing piece of work. Despite the fact that the Mac and Unix are essentially polar opposites, Apple has blended the two in a strikingly graceful way. Despite all the potential for culture clash, things frequently just work the way you expect them to.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
"Oh My GOD, it seems Apple has made their latest OS version SIMD-optimized for their AltiVec instruction set! We can't possibly emulate that! Our software will be way too slow to run Mac OS X! Quick, guys, let's figure out a way to save our asses and blame someone for this!"
I mean come on, this guy is bashing Apple for not supporting the 680x0 platforms until end of time, stopping the cloning, charging for beta software, and having this beta software available only for high-end Macs.
Well, the simple truth is that unlike Emulators, Inc, when other companies encounter trouble, they do something about it instead of writing rants. Apple has made upgrading to their current line of computers as desirable as possible. They look better, are a lot faster, and with Mac OS X, operate better than earlier Macs -- and people are lining up to get them.
The alternate history scenario with cloning, Mac OS 8 and beige 604e boxes would have killed Apple in no time (remember when people were counting the days?). But I guess that would've been magnificient for the Mac emulation business!
Marko Karppinen