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Can WINE Be Ported to OS X?

Posted by Cliff on from the share-the-wealth dept.

geek asks: "With all the buzz around Darwin running XFree86, is there any hope of porting WINE to OS X? This could be a major factor for some people to move over to the platform. Since OS X has some FreeBSD roots my guess is it wouldn't be terribly hard to get WINE working under it. Now that Apple has an OS with UNIX in the floor boards the possibilities seem endless."

2 of 14 comments (clear)

  1. BOCHS is probably more likely but... by Time+Kills · · Score: 3
    WINE is not an emulator. This is actually important as WINE doesn't emulate for instance an Intel processor, its more what I'd call a mapping layer and a set of libraries to implement chunks of Windows. As mentioned, WINE could probably be ported but it wouldn't be helpful.

    Something like BOCHS which actually emulates the processor as well is more likely. When OSX takes off I'd expect Connectix to be release a commercial Windows emulator though, just as they have for many years now.

  2. WINE no, but WINE+Bochs? by BRTB · · Score: 4

    WINE by itself wouldn't help much on a PPC, since it's only acting as a translator for the Win16/32 API calls, not the x86 machine code. Now if you could graft bochs to it, so you'd emulate both the x86 processor and the Windows API's, it might work.

    Of course at this point I'm thinking of the old saying about thing being easy to those who don't actually have to do it...
    BRTB