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

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.

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.

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/