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FWB Admits RealPC for Mac OS X was Vaporware
reiggin writes "In a press release on their site, FWB's new management comes clean and says that the former management had been lying about an upcoming RealPC OS X release. Apparently, not one line of code had even been written. This is a huge disappointment for anyone looking for an alternative to the now-MS owned Virtual PC (which, incidentally, Apple and Microsoft have said will not initially run on a G5)."
There's always bochs. Open source too.
http://bochs.sf.net
WINE = Wine Is Not an Emulator.
It is an API translation layer, not an x86 emulator. Thank you, drive through.
What did you eat today? http://www.atetoday.com/
You have to remember though that WINE Is Not an Emulator. It allows Windows programs to run on Linux on the x86 platform but doesn't actually emulate the x86 processor.
So you could use it as a start for a new Mac emulator but you'd have to build the chip emulator to fit underneath that.
JP
Actually I'm fairly sure that the union of the sets includes all the members from both sets. What is in question is the intersection of the two sets. Which is also probably fairly large.
The other PC emulators are:
Bochs - Open source emulator with some nice features.
MS Virtual PC - Probably the best PC emulator on the Mac. Now owned by the evil Microsoft corporation.
Wine only translates from the Windows APIs into X11 and other such things. There is no x86 emulation done, which is one of the reasons Wine is so fast. In order for this to work on a Macintosh system, you'd either have to be using PowerPC Windows binaries (which there are few of) or you'd have to include an x86 emulation engine in Wine.
Qemu emulates an x86 chip (among other things). It runs WINE. It's been ported to PowerPC Linux. While it's still very young, it shows tremendous promise.
Now all it needs is a port to OS X. Any takers?
Given that Half Life 2 will require PC systems the likes of which we have never seen and that Virtual PC has no hardware 3D support at all I would say its a moot point all around. You cant use Virtual PC to play 3D games, not since the Voodoo 2 went out of style.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Actually it was a hostile shareholder revolt. In fact the old management has been playing a lot of games (locking the new management out of offices, removing documentation, stealing computers, etc...). There was a nice little article about it written by the new manager (can't find the link now).
So could someone drop the "Insightful" mod off the parent comment, and add an "uninformed" one?
Actually, I feel very sorry for the new management. According to this interview with the new CEO, the old management literally locked their offices, stole the equipment, and has generally made life for the new people a living hell. Although I suppose it's possible that the entire interview at that site was staged, and honestly do not know the background story behind the whole escapade, it does not appear to me as if this was a SCO-like deceptive tactic by the old managers to try to get out of a bind.
The G3 and G4 series include support for both big- and little-endian modes. VPC uses assembly-level little-endian instructions for obvious performance reasons. The G5 is only big-endian. Poof.
Orange Micro sold PCI card PC's for Macs for years, you can still check the specs on their discontinued product page. A cool idea but it never really caught on.
I attempted to purchase something from OpenOSX, and never received anything. To their credit, they eventually refunded my money - but only after I resorted to vulgar screaming emails to whoever I could find. There certainly was nothing helpful on their site to address the problem.
Of course, now I'm glad I never got anything from them.
Stuff a new Mac can do which a Windows PC (default software install on both) can't:
.pdf from anything one can print
;)
- make a
- Services
- Miller column browser for filesystem navigation
- AAT / ATSUI - play w/ Zapfino in TextEdit
- $10,000 worth of fonts (including non-Latin ones)
- Mail.app (decent and safe mail client)
- iApps (iTunes, iMovie, iCal, iSynch)
- colour calibration which really works
By contrast:
- is there any app in a default Windows install which can take full advantage of the spiffy OpenType version of Palatino bundled w/ Windows 2000 or later? (bummer that has Ariadne swash caps instead of the original Palatino swash letters---only available in hot metal, though I did a digital font for a friend who has said letterforms
Moreover, if one adds in d/l'ing and installing free (libre) software, Mac OS X draws even further ahead w/ stuff like TeXShop (pdf editor lite!) and EquationService.app.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Before everyone freaks out bear with me for a moment:
MS Excel was originally a Mac product. The GUI version of Word too. They were both built using an Apple tool called MacApp. When they were ported to Windows the solution was to stay on MacApp and run it under Windows. This kept on for years and years, even after Apple discontinued MacApp MS kept their own version going internally to support their products based upon it.
Thus for many versions MS Word & Excel were indeed pretty much the same under the hood on both platforms. Indeed this became a big problem for Mac folks when a version of Word looked & behaved too much like it's Windows brother (not cousin: "brother", heck "fraternal twin").
Eventually the effort of keeping the underlying platform going, the amount of customization required for each OS, etc. all finally made the common code base too much effort. That was when they finally made the break a few years ago and yeah, the Windows versions were solidly the flagship products and the Mac one's became re-implementations, albeit with access to the original code for guidance.
Some parts of Office were never common. PowerPoint on Mac was never very closely linked. Access never was brought over, ironically MS even recommends FileMaker on the Mac and builds in support for it on their Mac Office suite. Outlook, there's been a long and ugly history of sorta-products with a new version coming out recently but never has it been a peer with the Windows version.
None of the internet division code ever had anything in common on any platform, or with their Office division cousins for that matter (the boneheaded naming of "Outlook Express" atyer "Outlook" notwithstanding). Indeed when IE 5.0 for Mac shipped it was arguably a far better browser then IE 5.0 for Windows.
So yeah, in the case of the two leading MS Office components, going back a few years ago, there was a common code base and yes, it could have been characterized (loosely) as just a recompile away.
Nowadays that isn't the case at all, and indeed with both platforms having large libraries of components and APIs any "native" application is gonna need a serious rewrite for each platform. Ports from 'nix, easier to do if it doesn't mind being a 2nd class citizen, Java on MacOS X is pretty much peer, but outside of that it's a lot of work.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.