Darwine! WINE for Mac OS X is coming
You heard me! The Darwine team is porting WINE to Mac OS X and Darwin. The first screenshot on its home page (http://darwine.sourceforge.net/) shows that it has good potential.
Comments?
Comments?
Comments
Originally posted by bunge
I'm getting to the point where I'll either need VPC for a G5 (not yet available yet) or I'll need to start carrying my PC home from work. That sucks.
Heh. Once this gets going you won't have to do that. VPC sux and it'll always be slow... but Darwine seems to promise native speeds running Windows apps. I'm curious to see what'll happen.
Originally posted by Proud iBook Owner 2k2
Heh. Once this gets going you won't have to do that. VPC sux and it'll always be slow... but Darwine seems to promise native speeds running Windows apps. I'm curious to see what'll happen.
Heh...native for PC...but there is no way to emulate that kind of speed for macs.
Originally posted by ast3r3x
Heh...native for PC...but there is no way to emulate that kind of speed for macs.
Don't be so sure about that yet... Let's see what happens..
Originally posted by Nebagakid
this seems very interesting.. .Do you need a Windows license?
LOL I doubt it since there isn't any MS code in there.
Originally posted by Proud iBook Owner 2k2
Don't be so sure about that yet... Let's see what happens..
Don't get your hopes up either.
The FAQ page says the developers are using Bochs for the x86 emulation. Bochs is NOTORIOUSLY SLOW, often described as running (read: "crawling") a magnitude slower than VirtualPC.
Of course, this could be useful if Microsoft ever decides to pull the plug on VirtualPC (not that that should happen any time soon).
Originally posted by SilentEchoes
Ouch I missed the part about bochs that kinda sucks
Heh.. VPC runs like shit for me.. Hopefully when this gets going well I'll be able to run alotta stuff natively... and it'll be using the Unix core to run... not a program...
Originally posted by Proud iBook Owner 2k2
and it'll be using the Unix core to run... not a program...
You miss the part about Bochs again?
Everything is going to be piped through Bochs, another program. Windows software will not be running "natively" any more than it does with VirtualPC. The only difference is that application windows may run in a rootless windowed mode.
Apps run through Darwine will not be any closer to the "Unix core" than Virtual PC. WINE Is Not an Emulator; that's what WINE stands for. It cannot run anything x86 code on a PPC processor. It needs an actual hardware emulator like Bochs for that. Bochs is not a lower-level library like Quartz or QuickTime. It's an application (and a pretty hefty one at that) that the Darwine people are apparently hacking to allow pipes for other processes through WINE.
Unless these people are going through all of Bochs' code and rewriting/optimizing it from scratch, you really shouldn't expect it to run a much faster than Virtual PC does. Emulating a CISC processor on a RISC processor is a very complicated (and intensive) task. There's a reason there aren't already faster alternatives to Virtual PC; real-time code translation on this magnitude is an arduous task to plan out, let alone attempt in code. This isn't a GameBoy they're emulating.
It will also be nice to have an alternative to VPC, A free one at that, Especially in todays world it makes more since to spend your money on a cheap PC at the same price as VPC and still run your apps faster than you ever could in VPC.
A nice little VNC to your PC box in the closet would be kinda nice.
This is a major long-term project, but it looks like they're on the right track.
run it on pure Darwin with such Unix WMs as KDE or GNOME. That's what I'd wanna do.
OT: Just wondering, if this is going to become a regular topic could you take the caps and exclamations out of the title?
Don't get your hopes up either.
The FAQ page says the developers are using Bochs for the x86 emulation. Bochs is NOTORIOUSLY SLOW, often described as running (read: "crawling") a magnitude slower than VirtualPC.
The main reason is that it's mainly written in a high level language (probably C) to keep it portable, rather than as a several, heavily optimised machine code programs.
Does anyone know how to get Bochs to install? I remember that there were some helper setup app.s about.
Emulating a CISC processor on a RISC processor is a very complicated (and intensive) task.
Not as bad as trying to implement a PowerPC emulator on IA32 though...
Originally posted by Stoo
The main reason is that it's mainly written in a high level language (probably C) to keep it portable, rather than as a several, heavily optimised machine code programs.
That means no Altivec, right?
However, the status indicates that it is source compatible with windows. This means that you should be able to compile windows code on a mac ( probably using gcc ) and then run it. So it would be a PPC windows exe.
This isnt such a bad thing. There is plenty of windows code out there that could be handy.