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)?

Comments

So, you're asking

[Anonymous Coward]

If anyone has popped the cherry on CherryOS yet?

Re:So, you're asking

[Triumph The Insult C]

well, it would appear as though the OS on their webserver has been popped. does that count?

Re:So, you're asking

[Anonymous Coward]

Jimmy, why do you always use such tasteless humor! Now come upstairs out of the basement, lunch is ready. And I removed the crusts off of your sandwiches, just like you like. The milk is warming in the microwave too, and the cookies are fresh.

Re:So, you're asking

[m_chan]

CherryOS.. run Apple software on Lemon hardware.

Re:So, you're asking

[!Freeky2BGeeky]

but that's linux/ppc not linux/X86

Re:So, you're asking

[mabinogi]

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"

Re:So, you're asking

[niteice]

I don't think I've ever heard anyone's member described as 'pointed', before, unless they've done some undescribable modification to it!

/me grabs steak knife

Re:So, you're asking

[steeviant]

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.

Re:So, you're asking

[grahamlee]

OPENSTEP-based...NeXTSTEP was an earlier OS that had a very different object library, BSD base etc.

recipe for a slashdotting

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, there is a recipe for a slashdotting-- let people run OS X on the cheapest ahrdware they can find...

Re:recipe for a slashdotting

[Phroggy]

Wow, there is a recipe for a slashdotting-- let people run OS X on the cheapest ahrdware they can find...

If their web server were running OSX, it might work a little better...

Re:recipe for a slashdotting

[John Harrison]

and then run your webserver on Windows using ASP for static pages.

Re:recipe for a slashdotting

[devphaeton]

If their web server were running OSX, it might work a little better...

No, but it would have had a more lickable error message.

I mean, that's what Apple is all about- licking stuff.

Re:recipe for a slashdotting

[Afrosheen]

Here's your google-ized dialog for the same window:

Would you like some After-Crash mints?
[Yes][No][More Results (11-20)] [Ok][Cancel] [I'm Feeling Lucky]

Re:recipe for a slashdotting

[djdavetrouble]

this bears recalling the excellent beos browser haikus:

These three are certain:
Death, taxes, and site not found.
You, victim of one.

delivered with a 404.

That was quick.

[Spackler]

They saw us coming around the corner!

Server Error in '/' Application.

Just a dot away from a PERFECT error message.

Finally...

[Daimaou]

I've always wanted to try OS X to see if I'd like it, but I've always thought buying a Mac was an expensive way to "test drive" OS X, and thus have never done so. $50.00 on the otherhand is quite reasonable, I think. Perhaps I'll finally give OS X a try.

Re:Finally...

[lakiolen]

Not counting the cost of "buying" OS X.

Re:Finally...

[over_exposed]

You still need to buy a copy of OSX. It's gonna run you a *tad* more than $50...

Re:Finally...

[krunk7]

I find nothing morally wrong with downloading a torrent if your intentions are to "try before you buy". I do this with every game before I buy. I give it a week, if I like it I buy it.....every time.

So try osx, just make sure you give it fair shake, the first time I tried it I didn't particularly care for it. But after giving it a thorough try out (e.g. not just fiddling in spare time, but used as my main os for a month) I never put it down.

cheers,
-james

Re:Finally...

[Kenja]

"Yay permissive Apple licensing!"

According to the license you cant run the OS on an emulator because its not "Apple hardware".

Re:Finally...

[Ford Prefect]

Not if one out of your five computers already runs it. Yay permissive Apple licensing! :D

Yay permissive Apple licensing not allowing the running of MacOS X on a non-Apple-badged computer!

Although...

Is this why I got a bunch of Apple stickers with my own iBook?

Re:Finally...

[Trolling4Dollars]

Yesssss... but have you paid for it now??? ;P

Re:Finally...

[mrchaotica]

hmm... crap. Maybe "Yay that Mac OS doesn't have product activation so they won't really be able to tell and it's not as if I'm sharing it with the entire world anyway" instead?

Of course, I wouldn't even need real Mac OS on my PCs if stuff like iTunes and Safari would run on x86 with GNUStep and X11 -- oh well : (

Re:Finally...

[squiggleslash]

Then buy an Apple keyboard and plug it in a spare USB slot and hide it around the back. You've introduced the missing Apple hardware into the equation.

Re:Finally...

[slashdot.org]

According to the license you cant run the OS on an emulator because its not "Apple hardware".

Then there are those of us that wonder the legality of such statements in license agreements. For example Apple could also put in the license agreement that you need to give up your first born child.

The real legality of such statements is only known after it has been tried in a court of law, which AFAIK it has not.

On top of that, some argue that the entire license agreement is BS. By law, a contract requires two parties to agree. Some argue that this agreement needs to be in place at the time of purchase. With most shrink-wrapped software you've no idea what you are agreeing to at the time of purchase.

Even if the software vendor would argue that you could return the software if you don't agree, there's a simple way to avoid agreeing to the license.

Basically when you open the package to get the CD out, don't read _anything_. I know the envelope may have some disclaimers about agreeing to a license agreement, well better not read that. You bought the software, you've no obligation to read everything that's being presented.

Same goes for the installation; just blindly hit the highlighted button until the installation is done. If it doesn't work, try the non-highlighted button every once in a while.

The point is, that it's very hard for a software vendor to proof in court that you actually agreed to the license agreement. "You have to hit 'I agree' to install. You got it installed, so you agreed!". I have no idea what you are talking about, I thought 'I agree' meant the color of the button was agreeable.

You could say, well, that sounds like saying that you didn't read a contract that you signed.

The difference is that when you sign a contract, you and the other party specifically sit down for the exact purpose of signing a legal document.

When you buy software, you've no idea that you are about to enter into a legally binding contract. So you simply ignore all the stuff that doesn't make sense to you (like you do with most purchases).

Of course, how well this would hold up in court is just as unproven, but there seem to be some lawyers (which IAN) that think that it will.

Re:Finally...

[damiam]

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.

Re:Finally...

[jrockway]

I like firefox on Linux (and XP), but I hate the mac version. Mostly because I can't middle-click links to open them in a new tab! Safari lets me do this. (Oh the irony, the vendor that ships with a one-button mouse has better multi-button support than a program originally designed to run on X11, a platform that has had three-button mice forever!)

I also like PithHelmet better than AdBlock.

Safari is my choice browser on OSX because it blends in with the rest of my apps. It looks the same as iTunes and iCal and iEverythingElse (Mail.app seems to stick out like a sore thumb, though.)

Also, firefox has this weird pseudo-window that only shows itself when Exposé is activated. What is with that...

Re:Finally...

[krunk7]

Hehe, yes I've paid for it. . . plus some. I bought a new dual g5 and sold my x86 laptop to buy an iBook. . . .so I guess you could say I bought it twice over I liked it so much. :)

Oh Boy!

[JoeLinux]

Now I can have my life-long dream of running a Laserwriter using appletalk!

Re:Oh Boy!

[drinkypoo]

If you put the laserwriter on an etherprint box of some sort, you can print to it using Linux (or Solaris) with netatalk. Laserwriters speak Postscript so nothing could be easier to support once you get them talking. I did it back in the days when a 486 was a tolerably fast computer and it only took me a few hours to get running including compiling the software and building a new kernel with appletalk support.

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.

Re:Oh Boy!

[node 3]

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 misspelled 'pedantic'.

but..

[TheScottishGuy]

isn't the whole point of running osX that it's mac hardware too? why would you want to run it on a pc?

Re:but..

[yamla]

Most of my software development takes place on ix86 machines, targetting Windows and less often, Linux. It just isn't worth the cost for me to buy an Apple computer.

I'm not saying they aren't good value for money or anything. But if I could compile and test software for OS X on my ix86 system, that could well be worth the purchase price of the software and a license for OS X. Provided, of course, it is fully compatible and runs at a decent speed.

Heck, if they really are close to 80%, this is a pretty good deal. If I was to buy Apple hardware anyway, just for testing, I'd likely end up with a 1.25 Ghz eMac or whatever. The emulation route would result in a much faster OS X system for me as my ix86 computer is generally always quite high-end.

Re:but..

[el_gordo101]

To be able to test web apps on the various Mac web browsers, for one. I'm sure that there are any number of other reasons why folks would want to.

Looks... non-existent

[Rosyna]

The screenshots are missing (last I checked), the site is full of spelling errors and they called it "Apple Install Shield". It being Installer.app, I guess?

Emulating a G3 at 80% might be within the realm of possibility if I was on LSD. However, saying you can do a G4 (which implies AltiVec) is just not possible. Seriously. That'd be like emulating SSE3 on a G5. Ain't gonna happen.

Re:Looks... non-existent

[Sc00ter]

They have the base for x86 (Darwin). It's just the UI that's for macs only.

Re:Looks... non-existent

[Datasage]

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.

Re:Looks... non-existent

[dalutong]

I would guess they won't because either 1) they have some no-compete-on-x86 clause with their deal with MS or 2) they couldn't have quite as nice an experience with x86 -- if you don't control the hardware it is much harder to have such a nice stable system

Re:Looks... non-existent

[forkazoo]

That, and there would be no apps, a huge amount of cost for technical support, and if 100% of the Apple user base switched over to OS/X x86 (by some miracle every app ever was ported), THEY WOULD STOP BUYING MACS!

Apple has had an "escape plan" for years. The original plan was called Star Trek, and it was a port of classic Mac OS. Now, it's called "If we wanted, we could recompile the GUI for almost any platform gcc targets in probably a few hours."

Re:Looks... non-existent

[forkazoo]

Have you actually worked with either instruction set? "It's probable that most instructions will map directly" is not a compelling technical argument. I'm not going to clasim to be an expert, but I have dealt in passing with both SSE and Alti-Vec. There isn't a 1:1 mapping. Even if there was, the differences in register layout make emulating AltiVec a bit inconvenient, to say the least.

I'm trying to boggle over how exactly one would go about trying to do it. My brain keeps insisting that register starvation really is an issue. I guess they just have a lot of stuff sitting in L1 cache, and keep a really tight loop for the emulator core. Regardless of the actual marketing claims, if it works, I'm impressed. They should just be very careful about letting Marketing make empty promises. If they fail to deliver, they are sunk, and have no credibility. If they had just made no speed specific claims, they wouldn't have to worry about failing to live up to them.

Re:Looks... non-existent

[civilizedINTENSITY]

DARWIN'S ROOTS

The Darwin team is indebted to a diverse collection of open source projects, including the following:

- Mach, which was originally developed by Project Mach at Carnegie-Mellon University, and later enhanced by the Open Software Foundation (now The Open Group).:

- 4.4BSD-Lite2, originated in UC Berkeley's Computer Systems Research Group and developed by a large number of contributors::

* FreeBSD, the primary reference platform for Darwin's BSD kernel development.:
* NetBSD, the upstream source for a significant portion of Darwin's user-space commands and tools.
* OpenBSD, with its focus on robustness and security and its integrated cryptography, provides OpenSSH for secure remote access.

- Apache HTTPD, the world's most popular web server, is included as part of the Darwin distribution, making Apple the largest distributor of Apache.

Getting from 4.4BSD-Lite2 to Darwin seems to have had contributions from both FreeBSD and NetBSD.

In 1997, Apple Computers, which had an interest in BSD and Unix after having bought NeXT in December 1996, produced a 4.4BSD-Lite2 derivation named Rhapsody in 1997. This eventually evolved, with help from the FreeBSD and NetBSD projects, into Darwin, a system with a MACH microkernel wrapped with a 4.4BSD-Lite2 kernel API. FreeBSD project cofounder and longtime core team member Jordan Hubbard headed this project. Darwin forms the heart of the Mac OS X line of operating systems.

Re:Looks... non-existent

[DurendalMac]

Atlivec is a 128-bit vector processing unit with 162 instructions. I would LOVE to see an x86 chip (32 or 64 bit) just TRY to emulate that at 80% speed. They'll be lucky to get 25%.

Re:Looks... non-existent

[Pius II.]

You mean Quartz Extreme. Quartz is to OS X what GDI is to Windows. If you rule out Quartz, you can just use Darwin (which is basically Mac OS X without Quartz). And no, you don't want that.

Re:Looks... non-existent

[laird]

Actually, MacOS X has always (since it was OPENSTEP, then Rhapsody) run on x86. Apple shipped (to developers) Rhapsody for x86, and it worked fine (if you had hardware that they had drivers for). And I've been assured by Apple systems software people that they're still maintaining the x86 build (and the other CPU's that OPENSTEP ran on) in order to make sure that Apple doesn't accidentally break portability. This applies to Cocoa app's, but not Carbon (i.e. old MacOS).

Future Slashdot Story Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Running MacOS using CherryOS on Windows using VMWare on FreeBSD using Linux binary compatibility.

Re:Future Slashdot Story Idea

[lordandrei]

You mean you don't want to run the palm emulator of FreeBSD first?

Re:Future Slashdot Story Idea

[Smiley8410]

Running MacOS using CherryOS on Windows using VMWare on FreeBSD using Linux binary compatibility ...on a dead badger!

Re:Future Slashdot Story Idea

[mikefe]

Why emulate when I was born with two native ones?

Re:Future Slashdot Story Idea

[Lord_Slepnir]

What I want to see: Someone running MacOS on CherryOS on Virtual PC on MacOS.

Re:Future Slashdot Story Idea

[julesh]

I don't believe FreeBSD runs on dead badgers. You'd probably have to install Linux and then use Bochs to run it.

Now where did I leave that reanimation scroll...?

Re:Future Slashdot Story Idea

[MADCOWbeserk]

I don't believe FreeBSD runs on dead badgers

I think there is a NETBSD port for that platform.

so....

[dummkopf]

does it also do the "diiiiiiing" when you start up? should not, as the usual PC has no built-in speaker. that will take away a big chunk from the experience....

Re:Site is dead?

[savagedome]

Try this instead.

OS X on PC's???

[bpatterson]

What a perversion.... I'm going back to getting my Cuisenart to run Debian. - B

Re:CherryOS goes down!

[johnnyb]

It's running DotNet. [troll]It will probably be down for the rest of the day.[/troll]

I'll finally...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll finally be able to play all those games I can't get for the PC platform.

Uh...

[chuckcolby]

One can only hope that the emulator is more durable than their web server.

I'd like to see a comparison

[RangerRick98]

I wonder how this CherryOS would compare with PearPC in terms of speed and functionality. Of course, I don't know much about either product, so I might be comparing apples to oranges (or Cherries to Apples?)

Re:I'd like to see a comparison

[mmusson]

Or cherries to pears?

Re:I'd like to see a comparison

[zach_smith]

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?

Re:I'd like to see a comparison

[Saeger]

PearPC is really, really, really slow, though it is making progress. For comparison against CherryOS's claim that it runs the guest 80% as fast as the host, it takes PearPC over 5 minutes just to boot MacOSX 10.3 on my 1.2GHz Athlon running Suse9.1 (kernel 2.6.5).

PearPC is free/FREE, though, and I only use it for Safari compatibility testing, so its speed isn't a major issue for me.

--

Re:I'd like to see a comparison

[cyfer2000]

What? I've been told not to compare Apple and Orange many times. But now people are comparing Cherries with Pears!

Re:I'd like to see a comparison

[Autumnmist]

From what I hear, CherryOS *IS* PearPC (which is GPL). Sounds like they're trying to rip people off with an impossible dream.

CherryOS = PearPC?

Re:There's your problem...

[ganhawk]

No. you got it all wrong. It is actually IIS running on a virtual PC inside Cherry OS inside a normal PC.

MirrorDot is Useful

[Didion Sprague]

I know it's more fun to bitch and moan about the original site being slashdotted, but if you want to RTFA, then simply go to mirrordot:

http://www.mirrordot.org

Enough already.

Re:MirrorDot is Useful

[DigitalRaptor]

Yeah, exept MirrorDot mirrored the site AFTER it crashed. That's funny. Maybe they should change their name to ErrorDot.

Re:MirrorDot is Useful

[Anonymous Coward]

unfortunately, mirrordot didn't mirror cherryos.com :P

Uh...

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Yeah that will piss bill off. People that wanted to buy an apple will just buy a windows pc, Cherry and OSX. That will really tick him off. Drain off all of the apple hardware margins and increase windows revenue. Life must suck for him right now.

one has to question the 80% speed claim

[HBI]

Even without reading the site. Never mind the shortage of general purpose registers on x86 and the lack of a direct mapping between instruction sets, one has to question any vendor that is running on IIS with debugging enabled and with the .NET framework enabled.

For the reasons why - just look at their site right about now.

Re:one has to question the 80% speed claim

[Ignignot]

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.

Re:one has to question the 80% speed claim

[Ignignot]

they're usable as either. All of the general purpose registers on the current x86 line can be used as either specialized registers (for example, one to hold a memory offset) or as general purpose registers. You can see the difference in different binaries that you use in linux - 386 binaries are going to have references to specialized registers, while 686 binaries will not. The 686 also has a larger instruction set, but that's neither here nor there.

Re:one has to question the 80% speed claim

[addaon]

Rename registers cannot be accesssed explicitly. The processor can use them so that a single named register (say, eax) maps to more than one rename register (say, numbers 7, 13, and 22) in different in-flight (that is, currently-being-processed) instructions. This is useful in the case that you have, say (using ppc assembly because I know it better):

add r3, r3, r4
ori r5, r3, r5
xor r3, r3, r3

(which puts r3+r4|r5 in r5, and 0 in r3; again, this is just an example, and kinda silly). here, r3 is used six times. For the first instruction, it is read in one context, and then written in another (writing always creates a new context). The ori then uses the r3 in the second context, and the xor uses it in the second context and makes a third. So, using tN as temporary (or rename) register N, this is the same as

add t0, r3, r4
ori r5, t0, r5
xor t1, t0, t0

The same could be done for the other registers, of course. The advantage of this is that, because the registers are used consecutively less often, scheduling is easier.

If you're interested in more details, check out (google) Tomasulo's algorithm.

Summary: Renaming is cool. Everyone does it. But it doesn't help you emulate more registers, particularly.

Cherry Os

[null etc.]

I tried it today... it crashed when I clicked the right mouse button.

Good idea

[rackhamh]

I have some Windows software I need reviewed. What would be the best place to ask? Oh, I know... Slashdot! Of course!

It works

[alecks]

This does work. I'm posting this right now from OSX, running in a window in XP. Ofcourse, XP is actually a VMWare window which I'm seeing through a web-citrix ica client on my sun box. isn't technology great?):

Fraud

[Mr. McGibby]

As pointed out on the comments on the article page, this is most likely a fraud. Writing a VM isn't the easiest thing to do. This software would likely cost much more than $50 because of the effort involved.

Re:Fraud

[hotspotbloc]

Lagos, Nigeria.
Attention: The President/CEO

Dear Sir,

Confidential Business Proposal

Having consulted with my colleagues and based on the information gathered from the Nigerian Chambers Of Software And Emulators, I have the privilege to request your assistance to transfer the sum of $50 (fifty United States dollars) into our accounts in exchange for a Mac OS X emulator that runs on your MS Windows PC. Great cost has gone into the research of this software and it must be transferred as soon as possible out of the country.

While there is no demostration copy available for testing I can assure you that you will be able to run Mac OS X at full speed on any computer with a Pentium III or faster. Screenshots will soon follow after we receive your check (complete with routing numbers).

Thank You And God Speed,

Howgul Abul Arhu

Re:Look out Bill

[AlphaSys]

Yeh, that should piss them off... make Mac-only software just another obsolete reason for buying pricey Macs over cheap Intel. Even with the cost a Windoze license you could still build a pretty beefy workstation to host an OSX image for the same money you'd pay for a closed G5 setup.

The flip-side: a report will be out in a week saying 90% of Windows installations are only used to pirate OSX!!!

Re:CherryOS goes down!

[dekropisvol]

LOL, got maybe a license for 5 connections :)

Re:one problem

[ShdwStkr]

behind on your security patches then, are you? :)

I have no idea

[antifoidulus]

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.

Re:I have no idea

[Lucky Kevin]

but they probably won't be very keen on a commericial product that violates the EULA.

How does this violate the EULA? Apple can't go after the company for simply providing an emulator.

Now the end user, well that might be a different matter.

Re:I have no idea

[vhold]

It's really a double edged sword for Apple.

Pro: PC users buying Mac OS, PC users buying Mac OS software, PC users going 'Hmm Mac is great, I think I'll just buy a Mac for my next computer'. Basically it way lowers the bar for introduction to the platform, seems like a MASSIVE win for Apple.

Con: Mac users not really utilizing their macs from a horsepower perspective, they are just browsing internet, email, a few things, they think, hmm, I could buy a cheap Dell, put this on there, and probably have an ok machine... hmm. Or... Mac users with an inclination towards games, it's an obvious win for them to have a real PC for games and use MacOS for absolutely everything else that isn't nearly as performance related. Aka: -Actual- hardware competition for Apple.. That alone will probably drive Apple into a frenzy.

I personally think the pros outweigh the cons, just simply because there are a ton of people that will never even try Mac simply because of the high cost and risk of introduction. This could lower that bar to almost nonexistant.

From the CherryOS Site:

[TitusC3v5]

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

Re:From the CherryOS Site:

[Feneric]

I personally find it hard to trust a company that's supposedly created a full G4 emulator capable of running Mac OS 10.3 but still hasn't figured out the difference in computer land between Mac and MAC.

from TFSite

[justforaday]

You can install all your favorite mac applications on your PC like iLife, iTunes and Photoshop ... to name just a few.

WoW!!! I can finally run iTunes and Photoshop on my PC!!!

Eighty percent is dead accurate!

[PCM2]

Yes, the process of emulating a PowerPC on an Intel x86 chip takes up 80 percent of your host CPU -- leaving 20 percent for user applications. What's so hard to understand about that?

Try this instead:

[temojen]

PearPC, same thing only open source, free, and runs on Windows and Linux.

Re:Try this instead:

[boaworm]

PearPC, same thing only open source, free, and runs on Windows and Linux.

...but... i have a Mac.. how do I do ? I cant see any Mac/PPC versions out there. Bugger!

Re:Try this instead:

[jdray]

Good point. Two things come to mind:

Does Cherry have any Pear in it? Will there be a code license war coming up between the two?

Also, does anyone here have practical experience with Pear? What's its performance like? I've got a Celeron 1.6 with 512 MB RAM running SUSE 9.1. Can I expect Pear to run like an 800 MHz PPC? 300 MHz maybe?

Re:Try this instead:

[isecore]

Yes, but PearPC doesn't come close to CherryOS so far unproven claim of speed.

PearPC does run Mac OS X, but at an absolute snails pace (Yes, I've tried it - Three hours to install, approx 1-2 minutes to open a finder-window).

If CherryOS indeed runs it at a somewhat decent G4-ish speed I'd almost consider 50 bucks to be worth it.

Re:Try this instead:

[Ford Prefect]

Can I expect Pear to run like an 800 MHz PPC? 300 MHz maybe?

Maybe 3MHz. Ish. ;-)

Re:Try this instead:

[TelJanin]

Apple distributes a free Mac/PPC emulator with all versions of their OS.

Re:But why?

[vhold]

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.

Pentium Hardware Lacks the Oomph.

[Spencerian]

For Intel processors to run PowerPC instructions takes a lot of power. Luckly, that power exists, yet it not allow a truly powerful Mac OS X experience since that OS has a large overhead for graphics power. Graphic hardware acceleration in modern uses of Mac OS X (such as graphic work and games) is practically essential. Still, I'll withhold judgment on this Cherry thing until I try it out.

Emulator talk reminds me of a funny error message you get if you try to install a copy of Virtual PC for Windows within a Windows environment running on Virtual PC for Mac OS. The error says somthing like:

"You cannot install Virtual PC for Windows within the Mac OS version of Virtual PC."

"(Nice try.) "

In A Related Story

[Omega1045]

A company has also released a Mac OS X clone for Linux. You can check out their site and download the software for you Linux machine (note: you will need VMWare or similar software to run it.

The URL: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp

I call BS

[mdarksbane]

There's no way you can emulate even a stripped-down PPC instruction set on x86 at 80% speed, let alone Altivec. The best I've seen any commercial editor come close to is a third, or maybe a half.

This'd be running an equivalent 2.7 ghz G4 on your top-of-the-line PentiumIV. They can't come close to that in hardware, there's no way they can touch it in software.

Sounds like a poorly-planned scam to me.

Re:I call BS

[Em Adespoton]

http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/ (PearPC) runs at around 20% speed, which leads me to believe that not only did the CherryOS people rip off the PearPC project, but they also inverted their ratio.

Re:But why?

[temojen]

Is there Mac-only software that people would want to run on their x86 machine?

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.

Gentlemen, start your binary diff tools..

[SiW]

..because 10 bucks says this rips off PearPC wholesale.

Re:Gentlemen, start your binary diff tools..

[bedouin]

Indeed. At best this is a repackaging of PearPC, kind of like what the WinTel people did with Bochs.

Download

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

The software is being distributed through electronic download at $49.99 USD...

Oh good. I'm growing really tired of mechanical downloads...

Re:Download

[HarveyBirdman]

Oh good. I'm growing really tired of mechanical downloads...

Pfft! Spoiled brats! In my day, we had to download them by hand. Without gloves! In the snow! Uphill!

And there we're bears! Oh, such bears we had!

Re:Download

[Anonymous Coward]

Uphill? Doesnt that make it an upload, grandpa?

Finish it

[sxltrex]

Running MacOS using CherryOS on Windows using VMWare on FreeBSD using Linux binary compatibility.

On an X-Box.

Screenshots on [H]ard[F]orum

[Corrado]

Click here for some screenshots and a running commentary.

Re:one problem

[jridley]

I run Windows 2000 and XP on 4 machines, and none of them go down unless I shut them down. One is used for Windows development at work, one is my wife and kid's internet/game machine, one is a laptop (not heavily used, but the kids play games on it some), one does a fair chunk of video editing and encoding. I regularly have uptimes in the range of 6 to 8 weeks, generally shutting down only for vacations or upgrades.

Re:one problem

[The Bungi]

Rebooting for a mere driver upgrade is ridiculous

But compiling the driver and then crapping around /etc for thirty minutes isn't.

It's a desktop PC. God will kill no kittens and the world will not come to an end if you reboot once in a while. If you do not want to reboot a desktop PC it's either because you have some psychological issues or you're running some mission-critical application on it, which is dumb to begin with.

According to netcraft...

[Anonymous Coward]

"We have no uptime data for www.cherryos.com at present, and cannot plot a graph. "

An appeal to /. editors and submitters

[rsax]

The request for caching content on foreign websites has been covered before so I won't ask why /. doesn't cache sites locally. But it wouldn't have taken much effort by either the editors or submitter to append .nyud.net:8090 to www.cherryos.com

http://www.cherryos.com.nyud.net:8090/

Use Coral CDN! It works and it's available, no excuses except laziness.

Mod parent down!

[ggvaidya]

Yeah, I downloaded that - and it brought me nothing but spyware! DON'T CLICK ON THE LINK!

It's just that simple!

[Zildy]

In other news, geek grows tired of carrying around lotion and a towel, invents woman.

Re:just buy a mac :-)

[Lifewolf]

Why not just go with inventor of the GUI and the maker of the first 64 bit PC ???

What do DEC have to do with Mac OS running on Windows?

Step away from the reality distortion field.

Manual avaliable online

[DarkBlackFox]

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.

Manual avaliable here:

http://www.vx30.com/documents/CherryOS.pdf

or as a .doc

http://www.vx30.com/documents/CherryOS.doc

Thievery

[JQuick]

Downloading a stolen copy of the OS is just plain wrong.

Apple paid 400 million dollars to buy NeXT. They then spent years of development effort integrating their older MacOS technologies to ensure backward compatibility. They released the resulting core OS for free use (in source code no less). They base a number of their core utility software on OpenSource products, and contribute much source code back to the community.

If you are running a BSD Unix, or running Linix, chances are you are already benefiting from Apple contributions to open source projects on a daily basis.

Ooh, you say, now we can pirate their GUI development utilities and application software! Grow up!

Why would you benefit from doing so? Because the software is worth using, will save you time, and will be enjoyable. If you benefit from a product or service, show some respect for those people responsible for providing it.

If you are not willing to pay anything, then use what is given for free. They respect and contribute to both GNU and BSD based projects.

If you are not willing to buy a new machine, then look on eBay, or online retailers who specialize in repairing and reselling older Mac hardware.

Yes, the software is damn good. No, they currently do not sell it on Intel hardware (either native or emulated).

Whether you or I like that or not, is beside the point. Using tools which improve your productivity or quality of life is worth something to you. If it is worthwhile, put up or shut up. In the open source world, contribute money or time to help improve it. In the commercial world, buy the product, and help fund further improvements.

Re:Thievery

[b-baggins]

Nice rationalization. However, people who still have their common-sense morality working know that, morally, there's no difference. You are taking something that does not belong to you without paying for it.

Re:Thievery

[Ford Prefect]

Theft or stealing has the implication of denial of the object from the original owner as a necessary part of it's definition.

Well, you can steal a kiss or steal a glance, neither of which involve the denial of an object from an original owner - and 'he stole my ideas!' is a valid, well-understood statement in English. 'Copyright theft' is also a valid, well-understood statement, much to the chagrin of many Slashdotters it would appear.

Why are people so worked up about this issue? Are they trying to rewrite the English language so they don't feel so guilty about something?

Re:Thievery

[kommakazi]

You're denying the owner the monetary compensation they deserve in return for you getting a copy of their software, so yes it is theft. You're not stealing the object, you are stealing the profit.

Re:Thievery

[mildness]

If ran off without paying for a haircut is that theft? Yes. You robbed him of his product even though there is no physical object for you to see.

It is called "theft of services".

And the fellow who says it's not stealing if he would not pay for it in the first place too high to talk too now. I'll post another note when he's had a chance to come down.

(:-{)}

Cheers

Bill

Re:Thievery

[metachor]

There's nothing crippled about Apple's hardware. It shitty ports that make some game perform poorly on the Mac. *cough* Halo *cough*

The irony being that Bungie, the makers of Halo, were previously a Mac-only development group. (Halo is the 4th game in the Marathon fps series.)

Microsoft bought them up, licensed Halo for the X-Box, and half-assedly requested a port to the Mac at the last moment.

Re:Thievery

[FurryFeet]

Yep, nice fallacy. Specifically, you are defining theft to mean what you want it to. Why don't we ask someone who knows what he's saying?

From Websters: "\Theft\, n. [OE. thefte, AS. [thorn]i['e]f[eth]e, [thorn][=y]f[eth]e, [thorn]e['o]f[eth]e. See Thief.] 1. (Law) The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same; larceny."

Mmmmhhh.... let's see... "with an intent to deprive..."... mmmmhhh...
Care to try again?

Re:Thievery

[kommakazi]

Thats because Bungie didn't do the port, Westlake did.

Re:Thievery

[westlake]

How do you know the copy you're downloading is stolen? Oh wait, you mean to say that you are stealing by downloading a copy? I see. Then it's just that you don't know what stealing is, not what is stolen.

I'll keep that in mind the next time I buy a kickass stereo system sold off the back of a pickup truck at 4 AM.

Re:Thievery

[phildog]

> Downloading a stolen copy of the OS is just plain wrong

Well, yes and no. Posting on Slashdot doesn't seem to have any sway over getting Apple to port to x86. But perhaps if Jobs took a look at Suprnova.org and saw thousands of people downloading his beautiful OS at the same time a little light would go on: hey there's a market here! So pirating the software is probably the best way a tiny individual like you or me can "cast a vote."

I would gladly pay full retail for an Apple-sanctioned OSX on PC release. I would even do so if they had huge disclaimers: Won't work on all types of hardware! Easy Mac things like burning dvds might not work at all on PCs! and so on.

Maybe that is the answer--Apple should pick one and only one x86 desktop, video card, cd/dvd burner, and monitor combo and call it "OSX approved". I would buy such a machine the day it was released. With success they could maybe expand things a bit to more supported platforms. Isn't that kind of what Microsoft is doing with the Media Center PC?

But I'm not going to buy a mac any time soon.

Re:Thievery

[OnanTheBarbarian]

Uh, it's hard to imagine what people mean when they say "theft of services", then. If I flee Supercuts after getting my hair cut, I'm not denying anyone a subsequent haircut from the same person, but I am definitely stealing something.

This seems to be a popular semantic game on /. whenever this topic comes up; redefine 'theft' narrowly and then celebrate the fact that software piracy doesn't equal theft.

Next up: someone will no doubt assure us that it's permissible to pirate stuff because it's 'low quality' or because they want to 'try before they buy' or some such. Like all that stolen IP out there is this big protest against capitalist exploitation and mediocrity.

Re:Thievery

[moonbender]

Why are people so worked up about this issue?

It's not that easy. Stealing does have multiple meanings but many people will use "to steal" and mean "to violate copyrights" but treat it as if they said "to deny access". It's like saying "to steal a kiss" without being aware that in that instance no kisses are actually being denied access to.
And of course, stealing does have more of a negative connotation than violating copyrights, for good reasons since denial of access is arguably a more severe crime, and for the not so good reason that it's simple a more commonly used term and a more commonly prosecuted crime.
To a certain degree, the same is true for "pirate", although only the latter aspect - nobody calls a P2Per a pirate without being aware that it has a very different meaning than originally. It does have the derogatory quality to it, though, at least in the real world.

Arguably, in the context of a discussion on the morality or whatever of file sharing etc, it's a good idea to use seperate terms for denial of access and copyright violations, because using the term "stealing" to refer both of them obscures the difference, which some might argue is key. Certainly there's nothing wrong with being specific. Similarily, in a hypothetical discussion of cars vs bicycles, you probably shouldn't use the word vehicle to refer to either. (I admit that's an exaggerated example to make the point.)

Re:Thievery

[JQuick]

The court system (both federal, and most states) does not agree with you.

You are correct that until rather recently most statutes concerning theft did correspond to older dictionary definitions requiring that a physical object be missing of that an object be moved from its rightful place.

However in 20th century statutes using the word "theft" began appearing which no longer rely on that old definition.

Statutes for theft of service, involving electrical power define unpaid use of electricity as theft. You have not stolen electrons, merely some of the motive power they convey. Legally however this is a from of theft. Later, theft of service in other forms was legislated. Tapping into a cable TV feed, receiving and decrypting real time stock ticker information broadcast over radio, are all considered theft by both federal and state laws.

In the latter form, you have deprived no-one of use of their property. You have however, attempted to derive personal benefit from something for which you have not paid.

On legal grounds your definition of theft appears unsound.

I see many problems with intellectual property and patent laws which no longer serve the public. Their intent was to provide a short time limited monopoly which was to spur innovation, and then devolve to the public domain and benefit everyone. In my opinion the grant of limited monopoly is no longer limited, and the benefit to the public vastly reduced. However that is a matter of politics, not of pragmatics or ethics.

I agree with your opinion that copying aught to be somehow different. However, ethically and pragmatically it still feels like theft. Legally, it also looks like theft.

Admitting that it is an illegal act, but insisting it is not theft is mere hair splitting.

Re:Thievery

[westlake]

It's still wrong and illegal - so why are you so upset at the thought that it might not actually be theft?

The more interesting question is why you should become so upset when by common usage or statutory definition copyright infringement does become theft. You have already admitted that it is illegal and immoral.

If I shoot your father dead, will you accuse me of stealing his life, and try to have me prosecuted for theft? No, you'll accuse me of homicide

"Stealing a life" would be acceptable almost anywhere as a poetic definition of murder, even though a man cannot be owned as property in the modern world.

The pursuit of civil remedies, monetary compensation, for crimes as extreme as murder and rape was encouraged in the law codes of Alfred the Great (871-899), and still has relevance today, as O.J. Simpson discovered.

Re:Thievery

[nathanh]

Uh, it's hard to imagine what people mean when they say "theft of services", then. If I flee Supercuts after getting my hair cut, I'm not denying anyone a subsequent haircut from the same person, but I am definitely stealing something.

It's not a sufficiently accurate analogy to copyright infringement. When you sat down for your haircut there was an implicit contract. You would get your haircut and the barber would get your money. When you ran away after getting your haircut it wasn't the haircut you were "stealing", it was the money you owed the barber.

With copyright infringement you never even meet the owner of the copyright work. You put all the effort into making the copy. Although the owner has been "ripped off" it's not money you've "stolen"; what you've done is violated their exclusive right to copy or to permit copying. The lost opportunity cost - what you would have paid for the copyrighted work if you'd bought one of the owner's sanctioned copies - is not the same thing as theft. Look up "opportunity cost". It's a standard economic term. It's not theft.

While I agree copyright infringement is illegal I don't think your "haircut analogy" cuts it (pun!).

Re:Thievery

[homer_ca]

Isn't that kind of what Microsoft is doing with the Media Center PC?

Yes, it's an OEM-only release. Hardware support for tuner cards and remote controls is pretty limited so MS only sells it to OEMs who preinstall it on systems with tested compatible hardware. OEM also means don't call Microsoft for support, call the hardware manufacturer.

Re:Thievery

[Vellmont]

It is called "theft of services".


Nice try, but wrong. Software licensing isn't a service. It's a product and if you copy software without a license you're breaking copyright law. It's really quite as simple as that. It's not a criminal act, but it is something you can be taken to civil court for and sued for damages. Theft of service would be more like contracting with someone to write you a software product, receiving the end product, then stiffing them when it comes time to pay.

Any attempts to define breaking copyright law as theft are just plain wrong as a legal definition. Attempts to define it morally as theft are problematic at best since the immoral act is generally considered to be depriving someone of their property, breaking and entering, etc. Violating copyright law involves none of those.

You can still have your moral qualms about it, just don't try to associate copyright violations with theft.

Re:Thievery

[div_B]

If I had no intention of buying a CD, and I copy it, I have not harmed anyone in any way.

I'm not staunchly for or against here, but there's a big flaw in this argument.

What if you have no intention of buying the CD, only because you know you don't have to? What if you couldn't possibly obtain it any other way than buying it? Would you then consider purchasing it?

Let's be realistic, if you have no intention of buying it because you don't really want it, then sure, pirating it isn't really costing anyone else anything, but, I'd wager people generally pirate stuff they DO want, stuff they potentially would buy, if pirating it wasn't an option.

Re:Thievery

[dsanfte]

Just stop. You're wrong.

"Theft of Services" applies to a haircut because you are depriving the barber of his time without due compensation. His time is worth something.

Once again, if a kid in Russia copies Win XP, does Ballmer's jaguar stall for 20 minutes? No. Please, just shut up.

Re:Thievery

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

Not quite. You really don't have to deprive them of anything.

My local Sam's Club has to discard unpurchased rotisserie ribs every evening lest they go bad. Is it theft if I take one about 10 minutes before closing (before they've discarded it) without paying for it?

Yes. There's nothing you're depriving them of, there's nothing they'd lose, but it's still theft, because you've taken something from them without permission.

What are you talking about?

[pjt33]

What's a right mouse button?

Re:What are you talking about?

[mslinux]

A right mouse button is an evil idea thought up by Bill Gates to confuse Mac users. It causes them to go into an infinite loop... which button to push, right or left?

"Dude... this PC has two buttons on the mouse and a wheel in the middle... what am I supposed to do?"

30 minutes later: "Fuck it Dude, PCs are too complex."

.

Re:What are you talking about?

[furballphat]

I thought this was true, until recently my main computer broke and I was forced to use my Mac. I plugged in a non sucky mouse, the optical light came on, and nothing happened when I moved it. any old USB mouse my arse

I think you misspelled Engelbart...

[Jim McCoy]

The GUI -- windows, mouse for control, pop-ups, etc. -- was invented by Dr. Douglas Engelbart at SRI in the 60s. It was Xerox who applied the metaphor to the PC, added overlapping windows and the LAN, and then coupled it with a development environment that was more that one-off coding hacks (important to be sure, but not close to "inventing" the GUI.)

CherryOS's speed claims, at least, are fraudulent

[0x0d0a]

That's because it's not possible to get 80% speed with an emulator as described. You *cannot* do this on a PowerPC emulator hosted on an x86 system. Even ignoring things like the fact that the endianness of all integer values is reversed, the PowerPC has several times more general-purpose registers than the x86. Even if the emulation system has zero overhead for its own code, you're going to have to be pulling registers in and out of main memory, which is going to be vastly slower -- that will immediately cut you down to a small fraction of the performance.

It *might* be possible to write a compiler that can build x86 binaries with PPC binaries as input. It would be hard and the performance would probably still suck, but this is the route that will give the best performance. There has to be a lot of register usage analysis that needs to be done to get something like this even remotely usable, and you are going to want to do this statically.

If someone ran out and made a legitimate system like this, several things would be true:

1) These people would probably be from a compiler company, because the work that needs to be done to do this efficiently is *hard* and requires a lot of techniques that compilers use.

2) If this is a commercial project (i.e. people are actually serious about making money and not getting hit by lawsuits), they would have gotten an OK from Apple and Apple would have made noise promoting this. Why? The only practical reason to build a modern Mac emulator is to run Mac OS X, which, on non-Apple hardware, is a violation of Apple's EULA.

3) The ROM problem is still present -- you can't make a Mac emulator legally without the Mac ROMs, which Apple keeps copyrighted. -- see #2.

Re:Good news..

[phillymjs]

it's a shame that Apple doesn't release OS-X for x86 hardware..

Look, you guys just can't get it through your heads that the reason why OS X works so well is because it runs on such a limited pool of hardware-- this allows the engineers coding OS X to make assumptions THAT CANNOT BE MADE in the x86 world, where a machine could be using one of thousands of motherboards, network cards, graphics cards, sound cards, etc. Windows developers have to code for the lowest common denominator. OS X developers code for specific hardware. Even the version of NeXTStep that ran on Intel hardware ran on a tiny subset of the available PC hardware. If your CD-ROM drive and motherboard weren't on the "supported hardware" list that came with NeXTStep, you were SOL.

That little fantasy you all have of buying "Mac OS X for x86", running it on some homebuilt shitbox you cobbled together from spare parts, and having it work as well as a G5 runs Panther today will NEVER come to pass. Microsoft has spent twenty years and untold millions trying to achieve that goal, and they still have quite a way to go.

Do you think Jobs could just snap his fingers one day and a few months later have a product on the shelves that would run perfectly on every PC capable of running XP today? It's impossible. And even if it were possible, you wouldn't buy it. Why? Because Apple uses their software to sell their hardware, so a copy of OS X for x86 would have to be priced to ease the pain of a lost hardware sale-- you'd either do without it and bitterly bitch about the price here on /., or you'd pirate it-- either way, Apple would lose money on it.

~Philly

Moderators, lay off the crack!

[John Harrison]

How is this insightful? Of course the software cost more than $50 to develop. They probably plan on selling more than one copy before getting sued into oblivion by Apple. For all you know Cherry OS hired a bunch of guys in India to write the thing and it did cost $50. In any case prices are governed by the law of supply and demand and not by you.

Re:Moderators, lay off the crack!

[ThousandStars]

I don't think the moderators are on crack: it takes a tremendous amount of time, effort and expertise to write an emulator, especially with the kind of features CherryOS claims to have. VPC has been around for a decade, and has had man-hours unnumbered put into making it usable.

The real kicker is the claim that the company emulates a G4, which seems highly unlikely for reasons too long to go into here -- read the rest of the thread for other posters' interpretations.

I'm skeptical, and so is the grandparent, and so should other readers. Extraordinary claims like the ones being made by an unknown company with no history demand extraordinary proof before they're accepted.

Given this context, I think the moderators are doing an acceptable job.

Scam alert

[saddino]

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.

Re:Scam alert

[Armchair Dissident]

Another posting pointed to this discussion where "dag33k" is practically wetting himself over three screenshots.

A quick nose at the screenshots reveals that the (now dead) screenshots are hosted at: http://www.cotse.net/users/secnet/.

So that's secnet. Not that you can see too much: "their" bandwidth's been exceeded. Doesn't sound like a particularly particularly good choice for a testimonial.

I agree with you. I smell a rat.

Re:one problem

[julesh]

Indeed. The Win2K machine I'm writing this from has been up since 30 June, and sees daily heavy use. Windows' reliability problems have been wildly exaggerated for the last 4 years, at least.

20% speed?

[mukund]

Company claims 80% of the speed of your PC

Re:CherryOS's speed claims, at least, are fraudule

[wulfhound]

... 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.

Re:CherryOS's speed claims, at least, are fraudule

[Pius II.]

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.

PearPC is not that slow

[KH]

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.

Re:PearPC is not that slow

[bedouin]

Disk test is pretty impressive. I only have a regular ATA drive on my PC. Got the score better than my PB disk.

Probably because the PowerBook (and most laptops) only have 4200 RPM drives in their default configurations.

Use the Coral Link if you can

[Danathar]

http://www.cherryos.com.nyud.net:8090/

Re:CherryOS's speed claims, at least, are fraudule

[arminw]

There is no reason why Cherry would have to get Apple's blessing for this if the emulator/translator emulates the PPC on an x86 box. Apple does not make the PPC chip and if none of Apple's code is used, they will not be able to sic their lawyers on Cherry.

Using the word "impossible" is dangerous. There have been too many times in history where such sentiments were expressed by skeptics, but what "could not be doen" was done, often to the chagrin of such skeptics. The proof of the pudding is of course easily checked out. Risk $50 +$130 for the Mac OS and try it.

Re:Good news..

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, like, someone made a kit that will let you put a BMW body onto a Honda! Dude! Like, I'll be able to try out that BMW stuff without having to buy a BMW! It will be just like a BMW too, I'll get some stickers and a steering wheel cover that says 'BWM' and then I'll be able to have the BMW when I want something that's easy to drive and looks fly and I can use my Honda that fixed up by adding a cheap Turbo kit, a big tac, and a bigger wing for street racing... Dude! It will be the best of both worlds! :P

I think it's a scam, i.e Fraud

[theolein]

For one thing, I just did a couple of whois on cherryos.com, all of whose contacts are listed as arben kryeziu, whose email is given as arben@bumpnetworks.com. Do a whois on bumpnetworks.com (which is a run of the mill web development company according to its website) and you get all the tech contacts as arben@kryeziu.com, which is a simple holding site, obviously the guy's own.

Now, this Arben Kryeziu guy is the one in the, of all things, java video player on the video link site.

So this guy has time to run a web development company, be the tech and admin contacts for all the sites, and run a PPC emulation development outfit on the side? I seriously doubt it.

Not that it might be possible, who knows, but companies such as Connectix (now owned by Microsoft) spent literally years, getting their x86 emulators up to about 1/4 of the speed of the host PPC CPU. And this guy has done it on his own, with a tiny outfit in no time and with no news announcements, and got it to run at 3/4 the host x86 system? I doubt it again.

And then, he sells the whole thing for $50????? And only by electronic download???? With a PDF manual that closely resembles the PearPC effort???? Has anyone actually downloaded this and paid the guy his $50???? Has anyone seen it run???

Even in that weird video (why no wmv, why no real, why no quicktime?) where he supposedly "demonstrates" the application, you don't actually see it running.

My guess is that, if the application really does run, it is simply a PearPC wrapper and runs at around 1/10th or less of the host speed. (Notice the typical marketing "up to 80% of the host" x86 system?)

I have nothing against Albanians (Kryeziu is an albanian name, listen to the guy's accent), but I think the guy is trying to make a quick buck off the hopefuls who want Mac OSX but won't or can't buy a Mac.

We'll see when the first real reports come in of how and if this thing performs, but if it truly is what he claims it to be, which I seriously doubt, then he has one big hurdle and that is Apple's EULA, which states that Mac OSX is only allowed to be run on Apple branded hardware.

Re:Good news..

[JudgeFurious]

"Microsoft has spent twenty years and untold millions trying to achieve that goal, and they still have quite a way to go."

Yeah but they suck right? This is Slashdot right? Microsoft still sucks? Come on, somebody, what's the official party line on this?

Re:I think it's a scam, i.e Fraud

[flibberdi]

I did some searching on google and yahoo, and I found nothing besides a note on an cached copy on yahoo of www.mbloom.co that says that the cherryos is moving to an own site (www.cherryos.com), google hasn't even indexed the page (that doesn't really tell us too much...) yet. The cached page on yahoo is broken :(

The mloom site sells an pdf2html converter....

Fraudulent postings

[theolein]

take a look at the poser in that forum making a big noise about this "wonderful emulator", the guy called DAG33K. Notice his English mistakes. Notice his location, "In da middle of da pacific". The do a whois on cherryos.com, and you get an address in Hawai. The tech contact, who is also the admin contact etc etc, is a guy called Arben Kryeziu, the same guy doing the video "demonstration", which you never get to actually see apart from an installation screen and some supposed OSX desktop, which looks very similar to PearPC. The guy's name is Albanian, and if you listen in that demonstration, he speaks with a thick accent, so my gues is that the poster on hardforum is the very same guy trying to pimp his warez.

I still think the guy is trying to fuck everyone for their money.

Re:CherryOS's speed claims, at least, are fraudule

[kommakazi]

No the genesis had a 68000 series processor, not a PPC. Old macs weren't powermacs either, they were also 68000 series processors.

Emulators aren't all they're cracked up to be...

[darkstream]

I produce fractal art and need to use a PC to do it (existing fractal apps on the Mac don't compare with Fractal eXtreme or UltraFractal - and yes, I've tried several dozen), so using VirtualPC seemed the best choice when I switched over in 2000. But the best configuration for this process was VirtualPC4 under OS9. VirtualPC just didn't make the transition from OS9 to OSX very well. That meant I had to reboot into OS9 just for fractal exploration. Having migrated entirely to OSX over the years, working in OS9 was difficult. All the apps I used were in OSX! I soon was forced to get a PC just for fractal exploration. The GUI was sluggish in VirtualPC6 under OSX and the rendering times were abominable.

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...

Let me educate you...

[kuwan]

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.

Re:Let me educate you...

[Krach42]

Maybe you should go and get some experience or at least some knowledge before you start talking about something you know nothing about. If _ANYONE_ says this to my post, I'm going to hurt them. And hurt them hard. First of all, it's not relatively all that hard to mimic the AltiVec instructions using SSE/SSE2/SSE3. Secondly, the majority of operations done by many AltiVec instructions use a limited number of AltiVec registers. The ones that do use the significant number of registers are things like matrix operations, complex mathematics, and bioinformatics type things. Next up, AltiVec is very well behaved. It does not perform any accesses on anything but 16-bit alligned addresses. If you access some value (x4)+y it will access the 128-bit vector starting at address (x4). This means that one can avoid all the horrible nastiness of emulating cross-page accesses. They're all well defined. Also, AltiVec produces little side-effects (the only exception that the non-load AltiVec instructions effect is if the MSR_VEC bit is not set) and no condition code changes (except for the vcmp* instructions) All of this adds up to that there are numerous benifits to implementing the AltiVec instructions in SSE, or even in just normal "scalar" code. This is because you can make the individual instructions much more efficient than those that require the overhead of the regular engine. Overall, it's hard to really say that there is much of a benifit. There are a lot of things that fall into the "overhead" section, of just matching the instructions to x86 code that does the exact same thing. But there's also a lot of benifit that comes from it. PearPC is making good progress in this regard. :P

Re:Could this actually help apple?

[forkazoo]

So, you really think that people are going to spend $50 for an emulator, and over $100 for the OS, so that they can emulate a platform they barely know exists? And then, the slow performance of non-native operation, the lack of the slick full user experience, and the quirks that are in every real-world emulator... All this will inspire them to buy a Mac?

IMHO, this is a system targetted for people who already have a base of Mac OS apps that they want or need to use, and have an existing investment in PC hardware. For example, somebody who needs a laptop, and wants to use it for games, so they have to get a PC, but also occasionally needs Safari for testing web pages, or X Code to do cross platform builds on the road.

I love my iBook, and I love OS-X, but there are relatively few reasons I'd feel a need to run it on my Dell.

You would have to...

[BongosNaked]

... try at least once to run virtual pc from your... pc running CherryOS which, of course is... running panther osx... which is running...

Re:I think it's a scam ... agreed

[adzoox]

I'm actually going to reveal something you may not know...

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 ... 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.

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!

Why Apple won't do that?

[Eminence]

The amount of interest this story generated (CheryOS' site is already slashdoted) shows clearly how many people would love to run OS X, but can't afford the hardware. In fact I'm one of those people - I hate Windows, but I'm too old to tweak with Linux. Apple's OS X is the best choice for the likes of me - easy to use, tons of good commercial software for the desktop user, no frustrating tweaking and adjusting to get it working and no Microsoft. However, prices of their hardware are murder when compared to the PC world. I know there are many good reasons for that, but what has bothered me for some time now is why Apple won't release OS X for Intel platform.

In fact OS X is a really great, consequently designed GUI on top of a robust BSD Unix. It should be rather portable by nature, even if it would have high hardware requirements (like lots of memory and fast graphic boards with again lots of memory). Possibly achieving binary compatibility for software would be a problem, but I don't think it would be necessary. After all on a Unix system porting software between hardware platforms is just a question of recompiling it. Now, why don't they try to do it?

As much as I hate paying Microsoft for XP I would gladly pay twice the price of OS X for Mac to be able to run it on PC. Why Apple won't do it? Maybe because they don't want to get into Microsoft's gun sight?

Re:Why Apple won't do that?

[adzoox]

Why is $529 for a 17" Monitor, CPU ,and keyboard/mouse + TONS of awesome software - with a one year Apple Warranty too much for you?

See the Apple Store special deals section.

Re:Why Apple won't do that?

[mikrorechner]

One word:

Support.

If Apple sold OS X for x86, they would step from a small variety of hardware to the literaly unlimited number of CPU/chipset/GPU/etc. combinations in Intel/AMD-land.

Microsoft has avoided this by practically denying the users of their OS any support and "outsourcing" it to their OEM partners (which will deny any support if you changed a single component in the system they sold you).

What would Apple gain by porting OS X? A few users that treat it as another Unix variant with a nice GUI, and most probably bad hardware drivers, like Windows had (and still has), responsible for most crashes of the OS.

But they could lose their reputation as a first class hardware and software vendor, and end up like other companies that tried to sell a alternative commercial OS on x86 (think BeOS).

Re:Why Apple won't do that?

[TheInternet]

bothered me for some time now is why Apple won't release OS X for Intel platform

There was a whole thread about this just a few days ago.

In fact OS X is a really great, consequently designed GUI on top of a robust BSD Unix. It should be rather portable by nature

It is. The challenges aren't purely technical.

Possibly achieving binary compatibility for software would be a problem

Next solved these problems a while ago.

Why Apple won't do it? Maybe because they don't want to get into Microsoft's gun sight?

There are a lot of reasons. Keep a few things in mind:

1. Next already pursued a strategy like this. If Steve Jobs decided to not do it again, there *might* be a good reason
2. How many copies would actually be purchased vs pirated?
3. Some of the desireable features of Mac OS X rely on intergration with underlying hardware
4. Do you really think you'd ever see an Office for Mac OS X x86?

There's no question people want everything everything Apple has to offer without actually buying any hardware, but it doesn't make any sense to do if such an action destroys Apple and Mac OS X development in the process.

- Scott

Re:Why Apple won't do that?

[jcr]

can't afford the hardware.

Why don't you just pick up a used machine on eBay? I see iMac G4's and dual G4 towers going for under a grand.

-jcr

Re:CherryOS's speed claims, at least, are fraudule

[meme_police]

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.

Hic Non Sequitur

[abb3w]

According to the license you cant run the OS on an emulator because its not "Apple hardware".

You presume that the emulator is running on a real PC, rather than one itself emulated on, say, Virtual PC for Mac.

A Report From Maui

[cmholm]

A short article appeared on the Wisconson Technology Network, among other places, whose author evidently ran into Aren Kryeziu at a hotel on the Big Island of Hawaii, and talked briefly about Maui X-stream. Unfortunately, the company office is in Wailuku, rather than the Maui tech park in Kihei, so I'll have to wait until lunch to drive over to check 'em out. Among the techno clique I've talked to in the tech park, nobody has heard of these guys. In all fairness, it's not unusual for someone to cut loose from the rat race in San Jose for a house on Maui, doing their own thing at the home office

Re:A Report From Maui

[cmholm]

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.

Re:Bah...

[Greyfox]

Nevermind the software, the average user's hardware is crap -- usually the cheapest they could find with various cards they bought later installed by their friend or whoever happened to be handy, irrespective of that person's drug habits, hygene or understanding of the need for adequate cooling, etc. And they expect the software to magically be stable on their crappy systems.

As a benefit of their monopoly hold on the marketplace, Microsoft can afford to ignore the users with the crappy hardware. They can afford to have the reputation for having crappy software that crashes if you so much as look at it, even if that reputation is mostly caused by bad hardware. Notwithstanding the host of crapware that installs itself within seconds if you hook an unpatched system up to the Internet. Apple doesn't have that luxury. They're the little guy, they have to have a reputation for quality if they're going to hang in there. They can't keep that reputation by letting Joe-average-user run their operating system on his Packard-Bell with discount motherboard and memory upgrade from Bob's World of Computers. He'll install OSX, it'll crash as much for him as Windows did, and he'll get pissed off with Apple.

Re:Possibly a good idea...

[nuggetman]

This could work out. The reasons why I would NOT get a mac are that they are slower and cost MUCH more than equivalent PCs, but more importantly, can't run Windows

This point has been debated over and over, so I'll mention the $799 eMacs (educ discount) and $949 ibooks (also discount) and $1199 iMacs and move on.

But now that Mac OS X is available on the PC (and is fast), perhaps I can use a fast, cheap PC to run OS X.

One solution, PearPC, is unbearably slow for more than checking website compatibility in OS X. The other, Cheerios (yes I know), may or may not exist and may or may not work, and may or may not just be a $50 version of PearPC.

Macs only have a chance vs. PCs because they have very efficient architecture. Apple doesn't have nearly enough money to compete with Intel or AMD, so they use a more efficient architecture.

Why would Apple compete with AMD or Intel? Apple makes computers, and IBM makes the G5s, and Motorola makes the G4. Intel and AMD do not sell computers.

Stop talking about of your ass.

Re:Good news..

[Graymalkin]

The way SSE2 and AltiVec work on a core level is entirely different. On the Mac VecLib is a framework that gives abstracted access to AltiVec functionality so I don't need to write up inline assembly for commonly used mathematical routines. If I took a lot of time to make my program work with the VecLib framework in OSX I'd have to spend even more time making sure the x86 port didn't get futzed up trying to run on the register starved SSE2 unit on someone's P4. The VecLib frame work would have to dance around the P4's 8 vector registers in really grotesque ways to get the same functionality as is provided by the AltiVec unit on G4 and G5 processors.

There's plenty of other frameworks that are heavily tied to AltiVec now. While it would be possible to gut them and get them working fine with SSE2 it would be a huge undertaking. It's taken years to get the good AltiVec support the exists right now, it would take several more to get an x86 port up to snuff.

Re:CherryOS's speed claims, at least, are fraudule

[renoX]

> 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

Yes, register renaming help but as the compiler don't see those hidden register, it may have to spill some value into the cache to free a register because it needs one and here the register renaming can't help you..

I think that the x86-64 good performance is partly because of this: going from 8 GPR to 16 is a big win, especially on x86 *ahem* less than orthogonal architecture).
The difference between 16 and 32 GPRs is much less interesting..

Re:Ummmm... darwin...

[Graymalkin]

The underlying OS is open source and there's yet to be a massive influx of ported *BSD and Linux drivers. There's been a handful of projects porting specific classes of drivers but no large scale efforts. Apple is not structured to be Red Hat and it isn't likely they would ever want to be. Red Hat survives by the skin of its teeth most of the time.

Quicktime is an extremely powerful media framework that pervades the entirety of MacOS. There's no open source equivalent to Quicktime. There's lots of open source media libraries but nothing quite like Quicktime. Open source projects attract some of the most talented software developers in the world. It isn't like Apple's software people are better than anyone else necessarily. They are however being paid to do something (such as make a pervasive media framework in the OS) fulltime. They aren't trying to write such a system in their spare time between going to school and working part time. It is entirely unlikely that a bazaar model of development would have ever conceived of something like Quicktime let alone actually built it. The fact that there's no pervasive media framework in Linux right now is good evidense of that claim I think .There's people that could design and build it but they don't necessarily have the resources or interest to. The Quicktime developers at Apple are being paid to develop Quicktime.

As such relying on people writing software in their spare time is not condusive to being an industry innovator. Many open source projects exist to build FOS versions of closed source commercial products. There's very few open source projects in existance with the goal of "make a computer easier for everyone to use".

PearPC HD files

[TravisWatkins]

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.

EULAs

[Garabito]

The real legality of such statements is only known after it has been tried in a court of law, which AFAIK it has not.

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?

Re:EULAs

[arminw]

To be safe against *any* such court ruling, just have a 12 year old kid install the software for you. Kids cannot enter into an enforcaeable legal agreement. If they did try to enforce the EULA, that should stop them in their tracks.

Top 3 Signs You're Running OS X on a PC

[Zhe Mappel]

1. Inexplicable urge to download Dance_Monkey_Boy_Dance.avi

2. Inordinate amount of time spent visiting rumor sites to find out when emulation will be sped up.

3. Funny, this beige computer case clashes with the drapes; I never noticed that before...

FULL hardware support? I think not...

[GFLPraxis]

Reading the article, it says that it claims full hardware support, and lists:
" It also includes full hardware support: hard drive, CPU, RAM, FireWire, USB, PCI, PCMCIA bus, Ethernet networking and modem."

No graphics card listed. Usually, that's not a big problem, BUT, Mac OS X uses Quartz Extreme to render all the windows in 3d with shadows and fancy coloring. No graphics card = horrid windowing performance.

So does this use graphics card? Because if it doesn't, we're going to have choppy windows jumping around, performance loss when you move the mouse over the dock, choppy Expose, etc. And graphics card isn't listed.

You people scare me

[FredFnord]

It's really nice that you're so plugged into the open source community that you missed, for example:

- All the optimization stuff they've folded into gcc

- All the fixes they've folded back into the BSD code tree

I'm sure there's more, those are just the two categories that I've actually used and found helpful.

And, of course, the 'overly restrictive license' is considered to be a 'Free Software' license by the FSF. It's not gnu-compatible (for which I am awfully glad) and it (oh horrors!) allows linking to proprietary non-free software. Since I am not a gnu zealot, I find those things to be positive benefits, not drawbacks.

But, of course, the facts never stopped an Anonymous Coward before, so why should they now, eh?

-fred

No Sound Emulation ... Just like PearPC

[Jemm]

CherryOS.com is down so I can't check for sure, but from what I've read so far, CherryOS does not support sound. I find it odd that PearPC and CherryOS would have this particular feature in common.

I've just spent a few days playing around with PearPC on an AMD 2400+ laptop with 512 Mb memory. OSX runs fine but a bit slow, kind of like a 233 Mhz machine running XP. Network and CDRom access work great, but of course no sound yet.

Honestly if I worked for Apple, I wouldn't mind PearPC as long as it did not become fast enough to be a proper alternative to actually buying a Mac. From the forum on PearPC's site, many people have posted that getting this taste of OSX has helped them to "make the switch".

For those of you who want to play with Mac emulation, have a look at http://www.emaculation.com/ .

Re:CherryOS's speed claims, at least, are fraudule

[PipsqueakOnAP133]

Yeah, but because you can't address these extra registers, they're useless for emulation purposes. All this does is let you have more inflight instructions (google for Tomasulo)

And as a side note, the G3/G4/G5 PPCs probably have those as well, since they're not a x86 specific thing. I know that the 604 does, and it's a generation 2 PPC.

Always some doubt over this claim.

[catwh0re]

Generally I will doubt any claim that suggests they can run PPC code on x86 hardware at any considerable speed, such as 80%, or even 50% for that matter. The PPC chipset has more general purpose registers than x86, how they map around the instructions to fit on an x86 chipset is usually inadequet and some kind of register emulation must take place. Taking any register functionality off chip is a method of emulation, that works, however it's incredibly slow, by comparison to native speeds. This is why it's trivial to get good speeds out of x86 code on PPC chipsets through emulation, and why the reverse is usually a marketing scam.

Digging Deeper: Jim Kartes

[revjonnylove]

Now that the seemingly Pacific sized wave of traffic has rolled over Hawaii based cherryos.com, some more information can be gleamed from it's now visible pages. Their press release contact is stated as Jim Kartes.

Jim also happens to be the admin and tech contact for vx30.com. A quick Googling of his name brings up several links, including the website for MauiGiclee, a Maui based printing company which lists one Jim Kartes as it's president. How many Jim Kartes can their be in Hawaii? 411.com lists only 1. Finding info online is fun.

Further Googling and whois searches show that Jim has a hand in many things Maui.

Lets list a few of em:
http://www.mauionline.com/ (Paradise Television Network Inc)
http://www.vx30.com/ (Video Steaming Tech)
http://mauigiclee.com/ (Print Production)
http://cherryos.com/ (Emulation Software)
I'm sure the list goes on. Jim's a busy man, you see.

Predictably, all these websites sport the same type of Java Applet video found on cherryos.com. Seems like VX30 (aka MXS Inc.) has been busy supplying Java based video steaming tech to a lot of Jim's other businesses.

At any rate, these businesses (excluding, by nature of this thread, the cherry in question) seem to have been operating for some time, the oldest site being registered in 1996. They also seem quite legitimate in their desire to provide services and products, bothering to list themselves with superpages, register 1-800 numbers, etc. These are not signs of scam artists looking to make a quick get-away, so that possibility can be put to rest.

The following options still remain:

1. CerryOs is a ripoff of PearPC (though the company has reportedly denied these accusations by phone)

2. The product is real and unique, though the performance promises are exagerated.

3. This is legit and we should all stop wasting time with such nonsense : )

I hope it's the latter.

Interview with CherryOS creator

[applextrent]

For more on this software, and issue, you can visit my site Apple-X.net: CherryOS: Interview With Creator, Plus Screenshots

Re:Not likely

[Bastian]

OS X is heavily optimized with processor-specific functions, be it AltiVec optimizations for G4s or just a lot of black magic to make the Altivec-oriented code still run well on a G3. The next version is going to include features that offload a lot of processing to the graphics card. I'm sure they put little to no effort into making sure that any of their code above the Darwin will run properly on a little-endian machine.

That's potentially a whole lot of rewriting (and potentially creating a need to mantain yet another code branch for various portions of the OS) in order to get an OS that is still going to only work on a very small portion of the PC hardware out there. And I'm not talking "you won't be able to burn DVDs" not working, I'm talking "the OS won't run, period, because Core Image doesn't support your graphics card."

Which means that they will have a target market consisting of people like you who are willing to buy the one and only one OS X Approved PC. Of course, to make that available as something other than a homebuild, Apple will have to make it themselves. Which will probably make it end up costing not much less than any other Apple computer because it will end up being a solid magnesium pyramid with no visible apertures or seams or something like that because that's what Apple does.

At which point Apple has gone through a ridiculous wad of cash in order to make your Mac work less smoothly than other Macs. But at least it cost you $100 less.

Methinks Apple would be much wiser to spend that money on continuing to improve the value of their PPC hardware. Maybe that way they can save you $150 on a better computer, instead.

Re:Could this actually help apple?

[bob beta]

I'll just save money by buying the emulator and running the free Darwin on it.

*rimshot*

Anyway, actually the most amusing 'emulation' trick I ever did was way back in the mid 90's. I bought a copy of Executor, which is the 68K Macintosh emulator (works really, really well except it only supports System 6 and earlier). I installed the Linux version, and the then-primative version of Wine.

I was able to then simultaneously run the Mac and the Windows version of Neko (the little kitten who chases your mouse pointer around the screen) and all on a Linux X desktop.

I had great hopes that the kittens would get in a fight, but they never did.

RE: PearPC, repackaged?

[King_TJ]

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.)

Screenshots

[icekillis]

Here are some screenshots:
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~achille/screenshots/1.JP G
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~achille/screenshots/2.JP G
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~achille/screenshots/3.JP G
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~achille/screenshots/4.JP G . I read they were taken by gene O'neil??? (not sure who he is)

Re:Screenshots

[dimiter_malkia_stane]

Look at the VideoEncoding pane - why they needed to show it on each screenshot, if not just to present something important? The screens look faked, the CherryOS application does not have an icon, menu, and just stupid white-stripe. It looks imposed one over the other one. Another tip: Look at all screenshots - the TIMES are synchronized on all of them. http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~achille/screenshots/1.JP G http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~achille/screenshots/2.JP G http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~achille/screenshots/3.JP G But this one here -> http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~achille/screenshots/4.JP G On the Mac OS X - it's 8:39, on PC it's 8:49. 10 minutes lag?????

Re:Screenshots

[Magic5Ball]

Between 3 and 4, note where the cursor is in the VM, above the dock, triggering the dock effect in 3 for iMovie. In 4, the Mail app is highlighted, but there is no cursor.

Mac users neglected AGAIN

[skinfitz]

Bleeding TYPICAL - something like this comes out and you can bet it will never get ported to the Mac.

I wan't to run it on my PowerBook but I can't because they will only support Windows and maybe Linux.

I demand to be able to run OSX on my Ma... oh wait.

Re:FULL hardware support? I think not...

[__aafutm5472]

Actually, my B&W G3 400 (overclocked to 450Mhz) handles windows and graphics just fine. It has the stock 16MB ATi card, which doesn't support QE, and no AltiVec instruction set. I'm actually impressed with how well this 6 year old computer runs OS X.

Re:FULL hardware support? I think not...

[steeviant]

Are you blind? Maybe you didn't read my post? I said that it uses QE to SPEED IT UP, and if QE wasn't there, it would DECREASE PERFORMANCE.

Actually, that's not what you said. You said:

"Mac OS X uses Quartz Extreme to render all the windows in 3d with shadows and fancy coloring. No graphics card = horrid windowing performance."

Implying that without Quartz Extreme windowing performance would be unbearable, that shadows wouldn't work, and that the colours would somehow be affected. All bullshit.

This is an emulator we're talking about, even if it doesn't support Quartz Extreme it can still achieve high performance.

Mac on Linux doesn't support Quartz Extreme yet performs admirably. Though PearPC's graphics speed is not very impressive, it's hardly the limiting factor there either.

I'd contend that the lack of/support for QE has approximately nothing whatsoever to do with performance in an emulator (as anyone whose used a PPC emulator/VM can attest), and that your previous post appeared to say that without QE support the emulator would not be able to render shadows or draw colours correctly. This, as you are obviously aware, is blatantly false.

Which is why I called you a troll.

Had you made the assertions you made in this post, I would have supported some of what you say, but I think without some kind of native graphics card translator, QE would be worthless anyway, and in fact would almost certainly be slower.

As you may already be aware, native graphics card support is not just a matter of 1:1 mapping between the PC and Mac graphics card, because of fundamental architectural differences between x86 and PPC. There would need to be some interception and modification of QE's graphics instructions into the correct form for the PC graphics chipset, which could easily negate any speed benefit.

In short, you're correct about it being slower, but the Chicken Little-esque, sky-is-falling way you went about stating it in your previous post made it sound like the emulator would be useless simply because it didn't support QE, which is far from truthful.

Screenshots on CherryOS website appear mocked

[Six3r]

If you look at http://cherryos.com/images/screenshots/7.jpg , you will see that the upper left bit of the Mac OS X desktop is visible, while the scrollbars indicate otherwise: The rightmost scrollbar is scrolled up, but the bottom scrollbar is scrolled to the left. Nor have I seen any third parties come up with any convincing screenshots as yet.

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