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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."
...why they need to _emulate_ the graphics cards? They are the same chip architecture isn't that the same instruction set, why can't they just dump it onto the chip?
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
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.
This doesn't take into account the fact that the Xbox 2 has been announced to use a brand-new ATI video chipset. As near as I can tell, this has nothing to do with cross-compatibility between ATI and nVidia, which it would have to be if there's any relation to Xbox 2 backwards-compatibility. Just thought I'd mention it.
"The gods do not protect fools; fools are protected by more capable fools." -Larry Niven's "Ringworld"
Another poster kind of said this. But what would be really smart would be taking out those features in Windows that ultimately are useless to the Mac user. Don't have a separate desktop and what not, but instead run the OS inside of OS X. Like X11 works, no need for Windows wall paper, just put a task bar on the bottom or side, and label the start button with a VPC logo or something. I would probably buy VPC... maybe, if it weren't simply Windows in a box.
Microsoft - Stuff that doesn't suck as bad as it used to...
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
Since version 7.0 has a few more days before it ships to customers, from a customer standpoint, version 7.0 is the "next" version, but it lacks the improved graphics support. Just so potential buyers of VirtualPC 7.0 aren't surprised, the AppleInsider article suggests a future (>7.0) version of VirtualPC will offer improved support for graphics cards, but 7.0 does not. (BTW: Don't buy software for a feature it might have in the future!)
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.