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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
SCO today announced they would be suing FWB, non-makers of the non-existant RealPC OS, over their use of SCO's intellectual property in their code. "Just like SCO, FWB has not written one line of code in this OS, and for that, they will pay." said SCO's lead attorney Michael Newstrom.
"Honesty and openness with the user base is a cornerstone of the new management team. "
This strategy was struck upon after it was discovered that the previous strategy of dishonesty and disceit was not as effective as originally hoped.
Look out SCO!
air and light and time and space
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.
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.
Zodiac Survey
#include
int main()
{
}
now get to it!
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
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?
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.
"The previous management had made claims in press interviews and on the company website regarding the status and upcoming release of RealPC OSX claiming it was in late beta and about to be released...I am sorry to have to admit that apparently the company has been a party to vaporware when it comes to the claims regarding RealPC."
Reminds me of an old joke...
Stalin is dying, and summons Comrade Khrushchev to his bedside. Wheezing his last few words with difficulty, Stalin tells Khrushchev, "Comrade, the reins of the country are now in your hands. But before I go, I want to give you some advice."
"Yes, yes, Great Leader, what is it?" says Khrushchev. Reaching under his pillow, Stalin produces two envelopes marked 1 and 2. "Take these letters," he tells Khrushchev. "Keep them safely - don't open them. Only if the country is in turmoil and things start going bad, open the first one. That'll give you some advice on what to do. And, even after that, if things start going REALLY bad, open the second one." And with a gasp Stalin breathed his last.
Well, Khrushchev succeeded him, and sure enough, within a few years things started going bad - unemployment increased, crops failed, people became restless. Nikita decided it was time to open the first letter. All it said was: "Blame everything on me!" So Khrushchev launched a massive deStalinization campaign, and blamed Josef for all the excesses and purges and ills of the present system, and bought himself some time that way.
But things continued on the downside - Kennedy successfully rebuffed Soviet missiles in Cuba, unemployment increased even more, crops failed even more, the Politburo was unhappy with Khrushchev's leadership and upstarts like Brezhnev and Gromyko were threatening his credibility. So finally, after much deliberation, Nikita opened the second letter.
All it said was: "Write two letters."
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?"
Ugh!
I just had this terrible vision of a thousand foot Venn diagram towering over a blackened charred world lit only by buzzing corporate logos, displaying the visual for your assertion, supported on the backs of countless Discrete mathematicians who are happily writing proofs despite the onerous weight of what they bear...
Damn, this is good Diet Pepsi (the essential 12939 formula sans corn syrup).
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento
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.
There is a protest in Europe today about the use/granting of software patents. Hence the closure of the site is temporary.
For more information please contact ceo@fwb.com
So you never have to update your address book when the CEO of the company changes, because it happens a lot...
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
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.
- tristan
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.
Here's quite an interesting interview with the new CEO that reveals just what a bunch of crooks the former management were. Interesting read:
c le _id_var=241
http://macdiscussion.com/article_show.php3?arti
I'm sure Microsoft would go for an OEM bundle approach on XP Home, so that would only add $30 or so (maybe less). What did the emulators cost?
The only downside to this approach is that it involves opening the case and inserting a card, anathema for many Mac people. The obvious answer is a micro-form-factor PC hooked up via Firewire 800, with some (simple) custom software to handle display on the Mac. This should go for under $300.
OK, now that we have a business plan, who's ready to hire me as CTO? :-)
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Bochs register-by-register emulation is going to be faster than VirtualPCs dynarec core? And then adding WINE and X11 to the fray?
You think that's going to be faster?
Cheaper, sure. In the same way that dog turds are cheaper than chocolate bars.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
You can Google for this vaporware and see promises from as recent as 2 months ago that everything is on track.
f wb /
This Mark Prewitt who was vice president of sales and marketing is caught pretty bad here.
http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/2003/06/10/
"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.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
All right, I'll bite.
You obviously know NOTHING about porting. It's hundreds, nay, thousands of times more complex than your misguided and bizarre impression of it. Mac IE and Office are nothing close to an "easy recompile" of the Windows versions. If this were true, it would mean there'd be no point in not porting anything except for wanting to shut someone else out.
The most important difference is that Windows and Mac use vastly different APIs (Windows's is called Win32, I believe, and the Mac uses Carbon and Cocoa). All the API calls need to be changed, and a lot of data structures have to be changed to the other side's API-specific structures. There are also different interface demands (Apple has particular UI guidelines, like you have to have certain items under certain menus; Windows probably has something similar, but I'm not familiar with it). There's a lot more, but I've never ported anything, so I don't know offhand what it is, and it would go on for too long anyway. And that's certainly more than enough.
Anyway, you're an idiot. They can't just "recompile their software to run on the Mac if they [feel] like it"; that's what the whole Mac Business Unit is for, porting to the Mac. This is, of course, a totally different issue than what the poster is talking about. So, have a nice day!
Dan Aris
PS Yeah, I fed a troll. So sue me.
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
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.
At this point buying a low end PC can be as much as $199.99 on a good sale day, with or without an OS. Sometimes you get lucky and Windows XX is on it.
The cost of Virtual PC is already close to $199. Unless having a PC is so visually unappealing that you can only have Apple's around.
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.
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.
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.
Join Tor today!
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).
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
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.
QEMU is a project that is moving at a nice clip, using dynamic code-recompilation (decompile x86 into C, recompile using gcc).
...), caching it's results.
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
There is a protest over European patents going on, but you can visit the project site at http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator