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

That's OK...

[Meat Blaster]

If you want to run real PC software, why not get a real PC? It's only like $300 for something that'll run ten times faster than any Apple emulated environment.

Somebody ought to get to work making emulator cards for the Mac that are essentially one of those mini PCs. It'd be pretty cool to have a true dual environment without having the emulation slowdown.

Re:That's OK...

[stratjakt]

If you need to use PC applications why did you buy a mac? Or, what can a mac do that a PC cant? All the aesthetics and battery life discussions aside, you leave me the impression that the laptop you have doesnt do something you need it to.

I'll get modded flamebait, but big deal. Its like buying a PS2 because you want to play Zelda the Wind Waker.

Wow...honestly in business.

[Brendan Byrd]

I appreciate that. I didn't know about this RealPC project, don't use a Mac, or had any interest in it, but the company is already a couple of notches ahead in my book for being so straightforward in their answer.

G5 motherboard photos

[Anonymous Coward]

If you look in photo there is a picture of the G5 motherboards which shows they have two different separate CPU connectors, not one like in most other dual macintoshes. Each connector will take one other of the CPU cards, which lets each have an independent bus to the board. In theory this would be good with something like RealPC or Windows on the G5, as you could have one half running windows and one half running MacOS still, AND NEITHER WOULD INTERFERE WITH THE OTHER as they would still have unique access to memory and things. Does anyone know if the motherboards in all G5 are still blue or is that just development?

Re:There's always bochs

[cerberusss]

There's always bochs

While I agree that Bochs is very nice, the installation is hard, the interface is very oldfashioned and most importantly, it's barely workable because it's so damned slow.

Re:Wine?

[OmniVector]

funny that this is posted on winehq.com then. as someone else said, you'd need to hook wine into an x86 emulation engine, but apparently that's being worked on.

CEO Interview

[Srsen]

Here's quite an interesting interview with the new CEO that reveals just what a bunch of crooks the former management were. Interesting read:

http://macdiscussion.com/article_show.php3?artic le _id_var=241

Funny

[bogie]

You can Google for this vaporware and see promises from as recent as 2 months ago that everything is on track.

This Mark Prewitt who was vice president of sales and marketing is caught pretty bad here.

http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/2003/06/10/f wb /

"Unfortunately, the same guys that do the development had to do the rebranding," said Prewitt. "We're all wearing different hats. We ended up ceasing development on it for about a week," he said."

Only a week eh? LOL.

Pfft.

[Jerk City Troll]

Isn't it odd that Ms does not plan to relaese Virtual PC for the G5?

Microsoft like doesn't want to give more reasons for people to move to Apple's platform. VirtualPC is really a program for facilitating a transition to Apple's platform from Wintel. Of course, it's too early to jump the gun and say that Microsoft are being anti-competitive.

I mean it'd be good revenue if every mac user had to buy VPc and WinXP just so that they can play Doom3 or whatnot..

VirtualPC can't use the native 3D hardware accelleration. There are no plans to. Unfortunately, Microsoft removed the VirtualPC FAQ, so I cannot cite where this is stated.

As for Doom III... it will run on OS X. Carmac first demoed Doom III on OS X. He loves Apple's platform because of the uniformity, which eliminates many nightmares for a game programmer. Trust me, it will be native.

SunPCi

[pmz]

I wonder if Apple would be wise to adopt Sun's SunPCi PC-on-a-PCI-card strategy. All Sun requires is that the customer get their Windows license from somewhere else (Sun is most definitely not a Microsoft OEM).

Why worry about whether Microsoft will release their VirtualPC, when a PowerMac can have a genuine x86 CPU with dedicated RAM? I don't see why Apple can't resell Sun's own SunPCi cards with different branding and driver software. Actually that would be win-win (Sun gets higher volume, Apple gets a really really neat toy to sell their customers).

QEMU is the future

[Corpus_Callosum]

QEMU is a project that is moving at a nice clip, using dynamic code-recompilation (decompile x86 into C, recompile using gcc).

The author, Fabrice Bellard, is a madman. Anyone with experience and time should join his team. You can already run Wine on PPC (fast, because of dynamic translation), and they are very close to getting the Virtual Machine (an x86 virtual pc) running on PPC (it runs now on x86).

This project aims at not just being a contender for emulation, but eventually blowing all the competition away due to it's ability to recompile everything into native PPC (or MIPS or ...), caching it's results.

There is a protest over European patents going on, but you can visit the project site at http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/