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OS Emulation Extravaganza, OS X On Down

Posted by timothy on from the top-this-if-you-have-the-ram dept.

HomeBrewR writes: "Behold the power of MacOS X... Windows XP? Who cares! You guys arent going to believe what I was able to do in one bored day at work. http://www.mystaticip.com/homebrew shows my effort. I took OS X 10.1, installed fink with rootless Xfree86 with IceWM running BasiliskII [running MacOS 7.6]. OS X is also running ircle and VPC test drive running Windows XP. Simply amazing. The speed on this iBook 466SE of all the apps left much to be desired. This was a feasibility test. The speed of either one of the emulators running by themselves was decent if you turned off all the eye candy in Windows XP. I'm REALLY interested in getting BasiliskII up and running to be able to play all those games that OS 8 broke...stuff like Ancient Art of War and Vette. Check it out and have fun duplicating the effort HomeBrewR" The question I'm sure you're asking now is Why stop there?

6 of 183 comments (clear)

  1. No, what I'm asking myself now is... by PeterClark · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ...this is important _how_? Really, someone, clue me in. Is it just a terribly slow day or something? Yes, yes, I know, this is Slashdot, where "News For Ners" can mean anything from the kind of toilet paper Bill Gates uses to the latest version of 'ls', but really, is there _nothing_ going on in the tech world of any greater significance?

    By the way, since his server is going to quickly go down in a ball of hot silicon (he has two pictures, one a 300+k jpg, the other one a tiff--don't want to think how enormous that is), I will describe the jpg to you, to save a click:

    The top shows OS X's menu bar, while the bottom has IceWM's taskbar, with the OS X's dock on the left side. In the upper right hand corner is a window running/emulating a System 7.6 desktop with an "About This Computer" window showing 62 out of 66 mb of memory used. Halfway hidden behind that window is a window of WinXP, showing the grotesquely large WinXP start menu. Fascinating, isn't it?

    :Peter

    1. Re:No, what I'm asking myself now is... by ThatComputerGuy · · Score: 2, Insightful

      WTF, why is this modded insightful? We're nerds/geeks, and shit like this is cool to us, so technically, it matters.

      Nobody's forcing your ass to read /. anyway.

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    2. Re:No, what I'm asking myself now is... by Score+Whore · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Speak for yourself my friend. The fact is this guy started up a couple of apps and got posted as an article on slashdot. If somewhere in there he happened to develop a new technique for emulation, perhaps it would be "news for nerds." Or maybe if he was using this to solve some unique and persistent problem that a number of people had encountered... But he didn't. Truly, he just ran some apps. It's no different than me taking a screenshot of my desktop at any random moment and sending it in. Hmmm that gives me ideas...

    3. Re:No, what I'm asking myself now is... by gig · · Score: 3, Insightful

      There is no other computer where you can run Mac OS X and Windows XP together, while also running Mac OS 9 apps and UNIX apps. I write tech books, and I do all of the Mac and Windows screenshots on a PowerBook, and have for years. Many authors do this. Very convenient. VirtualPC is a great Web testing ground, and it's very mature on the Mac and works really well. VirtualPC is essentially free when you buy it with Windows included, and it enables you to run any software you can find on the Web in Mac OS X. Still, I only run a Windows app for non-testing purposes about once a year. So much Windows software is crap. 300 shitty icon editors.

      There is plenty of native software for Mac OS X already, and the marquee apps have all either shipped, been demoed, or been announced. Besides, Mac OS X runs Mac OS 9 apps better than Mac OS 9 in most cases ... people aren't suffering too much on Mac OS X. In a year or so Classic will be mostly a distant memory, anyway.

  2. Getting Xfree86 running on MacOS X by Raffaello · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The easiest way to do this is to go to:

    http://www.macosxhints.com

    There is a PDF file that details how to get and install fink, then xfree (with the rootless patch), then your favorite window manager.

  3. Not that obvious (?) by fractaltiger · · Score: 2, Insightful

    IMHO, the pattern is:

    X-windows was here first. It works with Unix or Linux. So apple sees sees the similarity and takes advantage of being the only mainstream OS near a 9.0 release, so since they are already thinking Uni(x), they switch from version 10.0 to X in the label. Maybe the X has to do with the X in Unix also :)

    And then, XP comes in when Microsoft sees that the MacOs is picking up pace. Apparently, we don't need to wait 3 years for MS to upgrade a version: 95 -> 98 -> ME -> 2000 -> 2001.

    Windows 2001 is XP because they had to stick the X to not suffer from what would have otherwise been a bad looking name. And they had to copy the OS X candy interface to seem boldy innovative.

    It pains me that version numbers and now version NAMES are so important, because Netscape 6 [5th release of Netscape catching up to AOL 5 and 6] and MSN 5 [3rd release of MSN internet catching up to AOL 5.0] break version naming rules to catch up to more advanced software... version-wise at least. That's the pattern I see.

    --
    "Wireless : LAN :: Laptop : Desktop"