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Universal Emulators Return
webmilhouse writes "Wired has an article about Transitive Corporation that claims their software "allows any software application binary to run on any processor/operating system" without any performance hit. That would allow any program written for Windows to run on Linux or Mac, and vice-versa, which Wired likened to digital alchemy. The Transitive software is supposed to be released today. What do you think, vaporware or miracle?"
... if nothing runs at all, everything runs equally well.
"Consider yourself a member of a virtual corporation with Mr. Torvalds as your Chief Executive Officer." - Linux Advocac
Wouldn't you still need a bunch of supporting files and APIs to run a Mac program on Windows, vice versa, and for other operating systems? Programs make specific calls to the operating system, like windowing toolkits... this emulator must be huge to ensure everything works and they must have done massive successful reverse engineering of closed source files in the Windows architecture.
Okay, but for a product that really is this good, why is the newest news on their site dated March 2003? (There's an article in 04, but it has nothing to do with what they're releasing)
Does this mean I can finally get WINE to work under Windows?
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Yeah, obviously!
QuickTransit fully supports accelerated 3-D graphics and about 80 percent computational performance on the main processor. It requires no user intervention: It kicks in automatically when a non-native application is launched.
It sounds like it is software that translates one machine language to another? Pretty sweet idea!
It will still have some java-ish problems with each different form of hardware needing a unique version to translate. And then updating each of those versions as each change in the operating systems occur, etc.
Davak
that's not possible, just translating to another set of instructions takes some of the cpu's resources
According to TFA, this is a pre-compiler/translator, not an emulator. i.e. The entire program is recompiled for another platform using only the binary data as the source. This is theoretically possible and has been attempted many times, but such compilers often trip over levels of indirection that programmers add.
For example, a programmer might place the video address in a variable, then reference that for screen paints. Such a trick would be impossible to detect at compile time, and would only be properly handled by a true emulator.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Sounds like an emulator equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. I can't say if this is real or vapor for certain, but it sure sets off my BS alarm.
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www.fairtax.org
a Linux version of Quake III -- running on an Apple PowerBook
...and...
Windows laptop running the Gimp image editor for Linux
Funny how those applications are already available for those platforms, hmmm? I'd like to have heard about something being shown that isn't already available natively.
Unless it's a static or dynamic recompilation technique-- it could translate before execution, dumping a new binary which it executes. You'd have a much longer start time, obviously, but it'd run at the full speed possible. Assuming, of course, that your recompilation techniques are 100% perfect.
Doubtful, but possible.
That they claim their software is fast but yet their web site is reaaaaaaaaaaly slow
Given the illusive nature of their product, it is especially incredible that they were able to get five of the world's largest computer OEM's on board so early.
Now you can run any software, anywhere, with no speed hit (relative to a 4.77 MHz PC XT or a C= 64 or a 512K Mac) on hardware from these everyday major name brand OEM's:
Billy-Bo's Bayou's only Computer OEM
Wang Tu Short Compuder OEM of China
DR CLEMENT OKUN NIGERIA BUSINESS COMPUTER MANUFACTURERS
San Rio Hello Kitty Laptop Division
TransitivePC & Electronics
Act now, because supplies of this software are very limited, and once this run is completed, no more can be made (because their damn drunk coders crashed a pickup truck into their RAID array)!
maybe because it's not vapor anymore ?
it's already evaporated !
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
(1) Uhm, err, the current version only runs Pacman, which required some modifications to the binary
(2) only on Windows XP, but we're working on the Win 98 version.
(3) The technology used allows for theoretical performance equal or even exceeding the native hardware. This will work in next version, "FlyingPig 6.0".
sounds like this was written in some new programming language, perhaps one based on Magic.
So how much mana would I need tapped to run Photoshop in Linux?
my pet machine
there is mention only of unices. Operating System Mapper. Dynamite supports operating system mapping between any two Unix/Linux-like operating systems, as well as mapping between mainframe and any Unix/Linux-like operating systems. Don't see "Windows" mentioned in there. I assume it would be a lot easier to run a Linux version of Quake 3 on BSD-based Mac OS X than to convert stuff to/from a rather more different OS such as Windows.
so it is technicaly feasible that if you map out a fair amount of the pipelines of most of the popular chip sets, you could technicaly have a command chain to allow binaries the same calls through a sudo-emulation layer of the software.
fundamentaly possible, and even do-able.... but without a performance hit? no way. Each processor is geared towards a particular way of solving a physcial and mathmatical set of problems... some processors are designed for massive loads of database driven calculations (XEONs)... some for multimedia (G5)... some for science (PPC, Sparc?)... some for power savings (ARM)....
depedning on which archetecture your using, the performance will be greatly hindered if your trying to do something designed for a radicaly different chip. Such as trying to run some expansive G5 optimizied photoshop plug on a ARM chip.
"no performance hit" = total bullshit
--Idiots, Every single one of YOU, A flaming mass of conglomerated morons, hey wait a second, isnt that how RAID works?
This is vaporware. What they're claiming - "without any performance hit" - is impossible. Accomplishing the rest of what they claim is not impossible, but it's very difficult, and since the "without any performance hit" claim establishes conclusively that these people are bullshitters, I don't believe they can even come close to doing it.
So if it went from glossy brochues to vaporware, would it be product sublimation?
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Does anyone what the legal status of running this operation over commercial software would be?
The reason you need a licence to use software is because your CPU makes a copy of the program (in RAM) and this would otherwise violate the programmer's copyright. I believe that the licensing terms are generally pretty strict, e.g. one copy, to RAM only. Therefore, I'm not sure you'd be permitted to take a copy of their program, mangle it and dump it back out to disk.
Does anyone know of any reason why this would be permitted, or how people intend to get round this problem?
I appear to have been reading too much groklaw.
Well, looking at their website, I'd say the vapour is not going to hold -- otherwise they'd have their webserver emulate a way faster machine with a significantly faster Internet connection... ;-)
Confirmed! I saw a beta test of this product. It was used during the filming of Independence Day. They successfully used the program to upload and execute a virus from a Mac to a never-before-seen Alien computer system. It was even able to display graphics without having prior experience with the displays in question!
Come play Moral Decay!
After reading this, the term Universal Emulator doesn't seem to apply. Here is the text from Transitive's Website:
Honk if you're horny.
All of you naysayers take note:
This is not vaporware! I am on the beta test team for this product. In fact, right now, I just fired up a copy of Duke Nukem Forever on OS/2. Works like a champ.
Karma: -2147483648 (Mostly affected by integer overflow)
and
so yes, it does affect performance. You take a 20% hit. The "almost no performance hit" means, in this context, "computers are fast enough that no one will notice unless they're doing something crazy like video editing. Go back to surfing slashdot."
Yep, none of this is new tech. In fact, it's pretty old tech at this point. Emulators/translators and everything in between have been the subject of experimentation for decades.
Actually, I expect to see someone sit down and write this for Parrot sometime soon. Especially of interest would be an S/390 emulator written in Parrot.
Parrot, for those who don't know, is a VM that targets very high level languages, but it's flexible enough and has a sufficiently strong JIT compiler that a hardware emulator extension to Parrot could easily produce code that would perform as well as the described product.
The cool part about writing such an emulator for Parrot is that you get access to the resulting emulated code from a number of high-level languages, so you could port over your S/390 airline application written in TPF and call its routines from a Java, Perl, Scheme or Ruby program, jumping into and out of hardware emulation as you go. While high-level languages would only have gross access to data as opaque objects, the hardware emulator could provide the ported code with everything that it expects.
"Emulation" is a sophisticated art at this point, and it's going to get very interesting over the next few years.