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)."

Comments

There's always bochs

[Anonymous Coward]

There's always bochs. Open source too.
http://bochs.sf.net

Re:There's always bochs

[pajamacore]

To go along with that, there's a decent Aqua GUI for Bochs--Wintel by OpenOSX.

Re:There's always bochs

[Anonymous Coward]

In the interest of full disclosure, OpenOSX has been accused of stealing intellectual property from the Fink project. While there's no conclusive information about this accusation out there, there's plenty of evidence on the Fink project web site, and no response to the contrary from OpenOSX. So it's wise to make careful decisions about whether or not one should support OpenOSX in any way, including using their software.

Re:Wine?

[bmetz]

WINE = Wine Is Not an Emulator.

It is an API translation layer, not an x86 emulator. Thank you, drive through.

Re:Wine?

[JPRelph]

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

Re:Now isn't *that* a surprise?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Wine?

[metatruk]

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.

Re:Wine?

[Anonymous Coward]

QEMU is just such a chip emulator.

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?

Re:Now isn't *that* a surprise?

[larkost]

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?

Re:Now isn't *that* a surprise?

[BlueGecko]

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.

pseudo little-endian mode

[frankie]

Since this article doesn't even include a link about VPC, I can't curmudgeonly tell you to RTFA. So...

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.

Re:pseudo little-endian mode

[frankie]

G5 still implements full little-endian mode

Sorry if I mis-phrased my explanation; the last time I did assembly programming was a decade ago on MC68k.

The exact missing capability is called pseudo little-endian mode. According to some old documentation, this will "make memory appear to the processor as true little-endian by playing with the addresses of load/stores, but without reversing any bytes. The result is a fast, simulated little-endian world, but it's not true little-endian in memory - numbers do not have reversed bytes, but their starting addresses are changed."

sorta done before

[boomerny]

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.

OpenOSX is iffy

[Whumpsnatz]

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.

Re:That's OK...

[WillAdams]

Stuff a new Mac can do which a Windows PC (default software install on both) can't:

- make a .pdf from anything one can print
- 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