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Cherry OS Claims Mac OS X Capability For x86
jediboytj writes "According to the MacWorld Article, Cherry OS, does what Virtual PC does for Macs, only the opposite. PC Users are now able to run Mac OSX at G4 Speeds (Company claims 80% of the speed of your PC). It also includes full hardware support: hard drive, CPU, RAM, FireWire, USB, PCI, PCMCIA bus, Ethernet networking and modem. The software is being distributed through electronic download at $49.99 USD..." Note: it does not come with a copy of any Apple OS. Anyone in Windowsland tried it to provide a thumbs up (or down)?
I know you were just being a smartass, a time-honored tradition around here, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to be informative.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You still need to buy a copy of OSX. It's gonna run you a *tad* more than $50...
"The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his." - Patton
Not only that, but there is no information about the company on the website.
Its got that feeling of an overnight company. The whois record was only registered in july.
It wouldnt supprise me if its some company that took pearPC and is trying to sell it.
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
if this will work or not, but if it does, Apple legal won't be happy. The EULA states that you have to run OS X on Apple branded hardware(probably to kill clones), now I am willing to bet for the time being anyway, Apple will look the other way on non-commerical projects like Pear PC, but they probably won't be very keen on a commericial product that violates the EULA.
Monstar L
MXS Inc. announces CherryOS 1.0 October, 08 2004
NEWS RELEASE FOR IMMEADIATE RELEASE Contact: Jim Kartes, 866-661-5699 jim@vx30.com Media contact same.
Maui, HI (DATE) MXS today announce the immediate availability of Cherry OS software . Cherry OS is a software translator that allows you to install Apple's Operating System on x86 computer architecture. To put it simply you can now run Apple's award winning Panther OS on your PC! This breakthrough in OS development now gives home users, software developers and web designer's ultimate flexibility in both the operating system and hardware platform you use for your personal computer or testing environment.
Cherry OS runs Panther as a virtual machine on your Windows PC. This virtual machine has full network capabilities including the ability to share folders and access the web. The virtual machine also has complete access to the computer's hardware resources including, Hard Drive, CPU, RAM, Firewire, USB, PCI, PCMIA BUS and RJ45/Ethernet and Modem.
Arben Kryeziu, Cherry OS inventor and a software developer, got tired of carrying both a Mac and a PC around with him, so he invented Cherry OS. "Think about it," says Arben. "Now about 600 million PC users can have the MAC advantage. One computer to use all software and if PC users would use MAC software to get email, perhaps they would avoid viruses, Trojans and spy-ware." He went on to say that , "You can build and test applications for a Mac on your development PC, test web site design for Mac web browsers without having to buy the hardware, run OS X, the world's best Operating System, on a less expensive hardware platform and use your favorite Mac apps on a PC."
Pricing and availability
Cherry OS is now available only on line at www.cherryos.com as a download, for $49.95. (Mac software not included)
About MXS
MXS is a software development company specializing in video streaming software. Playerless-streaming.org ranked our vx30 encoder as the best in the world.
The products of Maui X-Stream can be viewed on www.vx30.com
And the masses cried out, "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0!"
PearPC, same thing only open source, free, and runs on Windows and Linux.
The best reason I can think of is that all the things I'd want to use a Mac for, are almost totally not CPU bound, whereas all the things I use my PC for are massively GPU/CPU related (games). So basically, I could have most of the best of both worlds in one box. Mac for everything internet/creativity related, and the PC for games/proprietary-work-apps.
There are lots of other reasons you could contrive, what if you had Mac friends that visit a lot but constantly lament being unable to use your PC? It fundamentally boils down to you wanting _both_, but you need more performance on the PC side, which I really think is more common of a case, just on games alone.
Absolutely: Safari, Camino, and ie/Mac. Web developers can see what their site will look like and how it will function on a Mac without needing to get more hardware.
I used to run Win2k on VMWare on Linux so I could see how my sites would look on a PC.
According to the license you cant run the OS on an emulator because its not "Apple hardware".
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Click here for some screenshots and a running commentary.
KangarooBox - We make IT simple!
I managed to get to the documentation page by refreshing rapidly. The manual is avaliable online, and hosted on a differant server. It's a 1.7 mb download, but includes screenshots and information.
.doc
Manual avaliable here:
http://www.vx30.com/documents/CherryOS.pdf
or as a
http://www.vx30.com/documents/CherryOS.doc
I'll bet they will have amazingly similar speed and functionality. How much do you want to bet that CherryOS is ripping off PearPC source code without giving them credit?
PearPC is free/FREE, though, and I only use it for Safari compatibility testing, so its speed isn't a major issue for me.
--
Power to the Peaceful
but that's linux/ppc not linux/X86
Visualize Whirled Peas
Hmm, their main page states, under "Screenshots":
Desctop & Task Manager
and under "What can CherryOS do?":
Skin enadled GUI
But beyond the typos, their "Client Showcase" features a testimonial from "Secnet Q&A Services" which Google doesn't have any information on (hmm, a Q&A company without a web presence?).
My guess either an out-and-out scam, or a an attempt to pawn off a modified copy of PearPC in an attempt to generate some $ and scram. Ballsy.
... except that modern superscalar CPUs (certainly x86, and possibly newer PPCs also) don't work like that - the registers you write to in machine code are virtual, and are mapped on to a larger hidden register file in realtime by the CPU. In any case a sure-fire L1 cache hit has negligible latency compared to, well, pretty much anything else on an Intel cpu.
Never mind the shortage of general purpose registers on x86 and the lack of a direct mapping between instruction sets
I won't, because the x86 line has lots of general purpose registers now. They just pretend to be whatever special purpose ones the programs need (if any). We've come a long way since the 386.
I submitted this story last night, and it didn't get posted.
There are no Mac ROMs, and there haven't been any since at least 1998.
Even the classic Mac OS didn't need the ROMs anymore in its last incarnation.
The less-than-modern Macs had driver support for booting in its ROM, and loaded the Toolbox from a file in the system folder (it's named "Mac OS ROM", though). Modern Macs use OpenFirmware, which is, as the name says, open. Moreover, it's easily emulated, allowing for running OS X on arbitrary PPC machines (with MOL). Yes, that means e.g. Genesis or AmigaOne boards. Or anything with a PPC, really.
I just Xbenched my installation of Mac OS X on PearPC over WinXP.
It's an AthlonXP 3000 (oced to 2400MHz or thereabout) box with 1GB RAM. I've assigned 512MB for PearPC.
The overall score is indeed abysmal 2.89. For comparison, my PB 12" (867MHz) gets something in the range of 80, I think.
But if I look at the score more closely, I notice that major drag comes from vecLib FFT test (scored 0.15!) and all kinds of graphics test (OpenGL test being the worst).
For other things, it scores about 30 to 60 scores range. Disk test is pretty impressive. I only have a regular ATA drive on my PC. Got the score better than my PB disk.
These results are quite understandable considering what PearPC is doing. I would say for some tasks, this might even be usable.
Very impressive, I must say.
No the genesis had a 68000 series processor, not a PPC. Old macs weren't powermacs either, they were also 68000 series processors.
Honestly, anything that requires heavy calculations is either going to break the emulator or run abysmally slow. Although email and web browsing can be tollerable (I often proof webpages using VirtualPC to get a view from the other side of the pond), I can't see any of the iLife apps being usable under CherryOS. They typically tax my 800MHz iMac. I can't imagine how slowly they would run under emulation...
Fun with Inkwell | www.coo
I have not worked with or even looked at either instruction set. Nonetheless your average application will spend only a small percentage of its time using Altivec...
Maybe you should go and get some experience or at least some knowledge before you start talking about something you know nothing about.
Altivec from its beginning introduced 162 vector instructions that have not changed from the initial G4 to the current G5. On the other hand, Intel's MMX/SSE/SSE2 instructions have evolved over time - roughly 57 in MMX, 78? in SSE and 144 in SSE2. Altivec has been a well-designed and versatile SIMD engine from its beginning while Intel has sort of hacked together their SIMD engine as they've evolved their processors. Intel's implementation is very troublesome for a programmer because he has to do many different things depending on what is available (MMX/SSE/SSE2). These instructions don't map 1:1 for the most part with Altivec. And while SSE2 is much better than SSE, it was only introduced with the Pentium 4.
Also, Altivec has 32 128-bit registers to only 8 128-bit registers for SSE/SSE2. I don't care what anyone says, trying to emulate 32 registers (when all you have is 8) in an SIMD engine is going to be a lot slower.
You say that only a small percentage of time will be spent using Altivec, but that's just not true. Apple has optimized a large part of Mac OS X to use Altivec, especially in Quartz (the windowing and compositing engine). This would result in a major slowdown for any emulator in pretty much every application (except for stuff like background daemons). You'd probably do better just to emulate a G3 so as to not run any Altivec code.
infested with jello like fishes no melotron wishes
I'm actually going to reveal something you may not know...
... I did an unupublished interview with the head of FWB ... he stated that they simply licensed the code rather than bought it from Insignia. The reason they never released an update after leasing the code was because they didn't see any merit at the time in releasing a new OS X version.
Both Connectix and Insignia (the two main companies that produced Windows emulation for the Mac) were actually just venture capital firms. This is why Connectix, at the height of every product launched, would just sell it off as an asset.
Connectix Quickcam = Logitech Quickcam
Connectix Virtual Game Station = Sony Buyout
Connectix Virtual PC ( at an undeniable breakthrough point) = Microsodt VPC
Insignia was the same:
Softwindows
Insignia is supposedly shopping this around.
I have found that these two companies were essentially started up by venture capital and paid off their investors, dumped their employees, and the owners got filthy rich.
Now, as for this software. I find it NEXT to impossible that the software is running a G4 at 80% speed of the CPU. If you were to translate this properly - Apple's CPUs are about 1.2X as fast as the equivalent P4 and P3 (G3 & G4 respectively) - so essentially the claim is saying it will run a 100% equivalent Mhz / speed ratio.
This means if I had a 3Ghz Pentium 4 with 1 Gig RAM - I would have the equivalent of a 2.4Ghz G4!! There's just NO way!
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Like the parent says, they use OpenFirmware (which is a fully programmable Forth environment) now instead of a closed ROM. Nobody is arguing that Apple is no longer using ROM, they're just saying that they're no longer using the closed Mac ROM.
The meme police, They live inside of my head
Either this is PearPC with a fancy GUI or they 'borrowed' some code from PearPC. On the video of their installer you can see macosx_3gb.rar being copied. The HD files for PearPC have to be a specific size so only a select few work.
Also, no one has made a foolproof HD creator that works 100% so obviously CherryOS couldn't steal that. That's why their profile setup only allows 3GB or 6GB HDs. That's what is available for PearPC.
"But I'm still right here, giving blood and keeping faith. And I'm still right here."
Maybe it hasn't been tried for Apple software, but at least one EULA was declared enforceable in an U.S. court. Sad, isn't it?
Rhapsody is alive and well - it's called OS X now.
Rhapsody wasn't the name for the x86 port, it was the name for the next generation Mach + NeXT Step based MacOS, which is what became OSX.
It doesn't suprise me that they had x86 builds early on, but I could hardly say they "Made an x86 OS"
Advanced users are users too!
The G4 and especially the G5 have a helluva lot more registers than the P4. Whatever the relative benchmarks may be, it's extremely difficult to emulate a PowerPC on x86 at decent speeds, because there aren't enough registers.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
MXS, the company behind CherryOS, Maui X-Stream, and the vx30.com web hosting service, isn't showing me a brick-and-mortar so far. Hitting the Google caches, I find 'contact' pages that alternately list a Wailuku and a Lahaina office, both of which were copyright 2003. I tried the Wailuku address during lunch. The office was empty, sign removed from door, and no listing on the building directory. I may try the Lahaina address for fun over the weekend.
Luke, help me take this mask off
For more on this software, and issue, you can visit my site Apple-X.net: CherryOS: Interview With Creator, Plus Screenshots
Yeah.... I was suspicious of the same thing. At best, I figured this was sort of a "fork" of the PearPC project. Maybe they added some of their own code to handle some G4 specific functions and bundled it up with a cleaner installer/setup program. But I bet it's still just PearPC at the core.
Their screenshots I saw this morning on their web site were only depicting OS X's main desktop and finder screens. Never once did they show it running a single app! (That was the deal with PearPC too, wasn't it? At first, people could run OS X itself, view the finder, and the prefs panes - but that was about all it could do without crashing.)
Now, it looks like they're claiming people are "trying to hack the site" and so on, and they only have some video movie available to download/watch. I was getting horribly slow connections to them, but the first 50% or so of the video I watched only showed the program being installed on an XP box. (Big whoop! It has an installer program that can actually copy files over to the PC.)
Nah, you're thinking of something else. There have been numerous aborted attempts at creating a next generation Mac OS under a variety of strange code names like Pink, Taligent and Copland.
Rhapsody was the name of the OS [strategy] developed under the leadership of Gil Amelio, it was heavily based on OpenStep (moreso than OS X), hence it's cross platform capabilities. Apple also had a version of the Rhapsody frameworks that ran in NT, which they inherited from NeXT. At that stage, the name for Cocoa was YellowBox, and the Classic environment was called BlueBox IIRC. There was no equivalent to the Carbon frameworks in those early days, which was the subject of much debate.
Steve Jobs became Interim CEO after Amelio's departure in 1997 and killed the cross platform versions of Rhapsody along with the Mac 'clone' industry. About a year later Apple announced the name change from Rhapsody to Mac OS X. They released Mac OS X Server in 1999, followed a year later by the almost unrecognisable OS X Public Beta.
Check out these screenshots, which (in order from top to bottom) show the gradual progression from NeXTstep's multi-column Browser to Mac OS X 10.3's Finder*.
NeXTstep
Rhapsody
Mac OS X server 1.x
Panther
*yes, I skipped the aqua Finder.