Slashdot Mirror
Next Version of Virtual PC for Mac to Suck Less
Anomalous Coward writes "According to Apple Insider, it seems that the next version of Virtual PC for Mac will at long last have native support for decent graphics cards. Microsoft's XBox development team is developing this shiny new feature. Macs equipped with ATi cards will be able to emulate an original Radeon, while Macs with nVidia cards will be able to emulate a Geforce 3. Since the XBox uses a graphics core based on the Geforce 3, this may explain how Microsoft plans to include backward compatibility for the XBox in the XBox2."
Well, in an effort to feed the troll - virtualizing the graphics card WILL give a huge benefit to the speed of the application. Assuming you run at 800x600 (Which XP likes to default to), that is an awful lot of computations being TRANSLATED (not virtualized) from x86ish to PowerPC and then the result spit back. Just being able to VIRUTALIZE that will in fact give a noticeable speed boost I would imagine. Certainly VPC and the running applications will feel a lot more responsive if nothing else.
.app" - I think the community at large knows that isn't going to happen for simple reasons like marketing and more complex reasons like trying to run an OS as a native .app. Right....
And the thought of Microsoft releasing "a version of windows for the mac that runs as a
Early Mac OS's used a "Mixed Mode Manager" as well as a weird "Universal Procedure Pointer" structure to handle context switches and memory accesses. This foundation hung around even after the OS and all current apps were ported to PPC completely, adding unneeded cruft to OS 9. They were finally removed during the transition to OS X and Carbon.
While you're not wrong, just to clarify: The Mixed Mode Manager came in with System 7.2, which was not really an "early" mac OS - sort of middling. UPPs weren't "weird", they were in fact a very elegant and inspired piece of design - for 68K code, UPPs were just pointers, plain and simple. So existing 68K binaries still worked. But for PowerPC code, they became a small transparent wrapper to a trap mechanism that determined whether the caller required the use of the 68K emulator, and if so, started it up. The result was that code of either flavour "just worked". It has been noted that this is possibly the only time that a dual ISA has ever been successfully implemented without having a separate emulation "box" on the system. The great thing was that as a programmer, if you just used the UPP macros, there was nothing special you had to do to support this dual architecture - 68k and PPC code could be mixed more or less freely. Neat.
What do you think /System/Library/CoreServices/Classic Startup.app is doing?
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.