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Cherry OS Claims Mac OS X Capability For x86
jediboytj writes "According to the MacWorld Article, Cherry OS, does what Virtual PC does for Macs, only the opposite. PC Users are now able to run Mac OSX at G4 Speeds (Company claims 80% of the speed of your PC). It also includes full hardware support: hard drive, CPU, RAM, FireWire, USB, PCI, PCMCIA bus, Ethernet networking and modem. The software is being distributed through electronic download at $49.99 USD..." Note: it does not come with a copy of any Apple OS. Anyone in Windowsland tried it to provide a thumbs up (or down)?
If anyone has popped the cherry on CherryOS yet?
Wow, there is a recipe for a slashdotting-- let people run OS X on the cheapest ahrdware they can find...
They saw us coming around the corner!
Server Error in '/' Application.
Just a dot away from a PERFECT error message.
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.
Now I can have my life-long dream of running a Laserwriter using appletalk!
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.
Running MacOS using CherryOS on Windows using VMWare on FreeBSD using Linux binary compatibility.
Try this instead.
Free XBox, PS2
What a perversion.... I'm going back to getting my Cuisenart to run Debian. - B
It's running DotNet. [troll]It will probably be down for the rest of the day.[/troll]
Engineering and the Ultimate
I'll finally be able to play all those games I can't get for the PC platform.
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?)
"You're older than you've ever been, and now you're even older."
No. you got it all wrong. It is actually IIS running on a virtual PC inside Cherry OS inside a normal PC.
Python script to convert photos into "artsy" portraits: http://p2pbridge.sf.net/pyPortrait/
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.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I tried it today... it crashed when I clicked the right mouse button.
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.
Mad Software: Rantings on Developing So
LOL, got maybe a license for 5 connections :)
behind on your security patches then, are you? :)
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.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
MXS Inc. announces CherryOS 1.0 October, 08 2004
NEWS RELEASE FOR IMMEADIATE RELEASE Contact: Jim Kartes, 866-661-5699 jim@vx30.com Media contact same.
Maui, HI (DATE) MXS today announce the immediate availability of Cherry OS software . Cherry OS is a software translator that allows you to install Apple's Operating System on x86 computer architecture. To put it simply you can now run Apple's award winning Panther OS on your PC! This breakthrough in OS development now gives home users, software developers and web designer's ultimate flexibility in both the operating system and hardware platform you use for your personal computer or testing environment.
Cherry OS runs Panther as a virtual machine on your Windows PC. This virtual machine has full network capabilities including the ability to share folders and access the web. The virtual machine also has complete access to the computer's hardware resources including, Hard Drive, CPU, RAM, Firewire, USB, PCI, PCMIA BUS and RJ45/Ethernet and Modem.
Arben Kryeziu, Cherry OS inventor and a software developer, got tired of carrying both a Mac and a PC around with him, so he invented Cherry OS. "Think about it," says Arben. "Now about 600 million PC users can have the MAC advantage. One computer to use all software and if PC users would use MAC software to get email, perhaps they would avoid viruses, Trojans and spy-ware." He went on to say that , "You can build and test applications for a Mac on your development PC, test web site design for Mac web browsers without having to buy the hardware, run OS X, the world's best Operating System, on a less expensive hardware platform and use your favorite Mac apps on a PC."
Pricing and availability
Cherry OS is now available only on line at www.cherryos.com as a download, for $49.95. (Mac software not included)
About MXS
MXS is a software development company specializing in video streaming software. Playerless-streaming.org ranked our vx30 encoder as the best in the world.
The products of Maui X-Stream can be viewed on www.vx30.com
And the masses cried out, "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0!"
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!!!
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
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?
Breakfast served all day!
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.
...but... i have a Mac.. how do I do ? I cant see any Mac/PPC versions out there. Bugger!
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
The URL: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
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.
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.
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.
..because 10 bucks says this rips off PearPC wholesale.
The software is being distributed through electronic download at $49.99 USD...
Oh good. I'm growing really tired of mechanical downloads...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Running MacOS using CherryOS on Windows using VMWare on FreeBSD using Linux binary compatibility.
On an X-Box.
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.
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
Click here for some screenshots and a running commentary.
KangarooBox - We make IT simple!
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.
Yeah, I downloaded that - and it brought me nothing but spyware! DON'T CLICK ON THE LINK!
In other news, geek grows tired of carrying around lotion and a towel, invents woman.
Karma: Excer..ex...excellahhh...realll good (mostly affected by drinking not done in moderation)
I managed to get to the documentation page by refreshing rapidly. The manual is avaliable online, and hosted on a differant server. It's a 1.7 mb download, but includes screenshots and information.
.doc
Manual avaliable here:
http://www.vx30.com/documents/CherryOS.pdf
or as a
http://www.vx30.com/documents/CherryOS.doc
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.
What's a right mouse button?
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.
Lasers Controlled Games!
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.
Company claims 80% of the speed of your PC
Banu
... 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.
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.
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.
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.
Honestly, anything that requires heavy calculations is either going to break the emulator or run abysmally slow. Although email and web browsing can be tollerable (I often proof webpages using VirtualPC to get a view from the other side of the pond), I can't see any of the iLife apps being usable under CherryOS. They typically tax my 800MHz iMac. I can't imagine how slowly they would run under emulation...
Fun with Inkwell | www.coo
I have not worked with or even looked at either instruction set. Nonetheless your average application will spend only a small percentage of its time using Altivec...
Maybe you should go and get some experience or at least some knowledge before you start talking about something you know nothing about.
Altivec from its beginning introduced 162 vector instructions that have not changed from the initial G4 to the current G5. On the other hand, Intel's MMX/SSE/SSE2 instructions have evolved over time - roughly 57 in MMX, 78? in SSE and 144 in SSE2. Altivec has been a well-designed and versatile SIMD engine from its beginning while Intel has sort of hacked together their SIMD engine as they've evolved their processors. Intel's implementation is very troublesome for a programmer because he has to do many different things depending on what is available (MMX/SSE/SSE2). These instructions don't map 1:1 for the most part with Altivec. And while SSE2 is much better than SSE, it was only introduced with the Pentium 4.
Also, Altivec has 32 128-bit registers to only 8 128-bit registers for SSE/SSE2. I don't care what anyone says, trying to emulate 32 registers (when all you have is 8) in an SIMD engine is going to be a lot slower.
You say that only a small percentage of time will be spent using Altivec, but that's just not true. Apple has optimized a large part of Mac OS X to use Altivec, especially in Quartz (the windowing and compositing engine). This would result in a major slowdown for any emulator in pretty much every application (except for stuff like background daemons). You'd probably do better just to emulate a G3 so as to not run any Altivec code.
infested with jello like fishes no melotron wishes
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.
I'm actually going to reveal something you may not know...
... I did an unupublished interview with the head of FWB ... he stated that they simply licensed the code rather than bought it from Insignia. The reason they never released an update after leasing the code was because they didn't see any merit at the time in releasing a new OS X version.
Both Connectix and Insignia (the two main companies that produced Windows emulation for the Mac) were actually just venture capital firms. This is why Connectix, at the height of every product launched, would just sell it off as an asset.
Connectix Quickcam = Logitech Quickcam
Connectix Virtual Game Station = Sony Buyout
Connectix Virtual PC ( at an undeniable breakthrough point) = Microsodt VPC
Insignia was the same:
Softwindows
Insignia is supposedly shopping this around.
I have found that these two companies were essentially started up by venture capital and paid off their investors, dumped their employees, and the owners got filthy rich.
Now, as for this software. I find it NEXT to impossible that the software is running a G4 at 80% speed of the CPU. If you were to translate this properly - Apple's CPUs are about 1.2X as fast as the equivalent P4 and P3 (G3 & G4 respectively) - so essentially the claim is saying it will run a 100% equivalent Mhz / speed ratio.
This means if I had a 3Ghz Pentium 4 with 1 Gig RAM - I would have the equivalent of a 2.4Ghz G4!! There's just NO way!
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
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?
Like the parent says, they use OpenFirmware (which is a fully programmable Forth environment) now instead of a closed ROM. Nobody is arguing that Apple is no longer using ROM, they're just saying that they're no longer using the closed Mac ROM.
The meme police, They live inside of my head
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.
.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.
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
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".
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
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?
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...
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.
MXS, the company behind CherryOS, Maui X-Stream, and the vx30.com web hosting service, isn't showing me a brick-and-mortar so far. Hitting the Google caches, I find 'contact' pages that alternately list a Wailuku and a Lahaina office, both of which were copyright 2003. I tried the Wailuku address during lunch. The office was empty, sign removed from door, and no listing on the building directory. I may try the Lahaina address for fun over the weekend.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Comment removed based on user account deletion