Alternatives to VPC?
First, I think that M$'s acquisition of VPC was on friendlier terms than Sony's acquisition of Virtual GameStation. So I don't expect M$ to try to bury the MacOS version of it, as Sony has with VGS. That being said, I think it necessary to prepare for the possibility of VPC getting buried. What alternatives are there?
The main commercial competitors to VPC have been RealPC and SoftWindows, which <a href="http://www.fwb.com"; target="_blank">FWB</a> is exploring the revival of. I'm doing these descriptions from memory:
RealPC works just like VirtualPC -- it emulates the PC (PeeCee?) hardware.
However, SoftWindows emulates only the x86 processor, and only does so for the apps -- all Windows stuff is handled by PPC-native code.
There are also some open-source competitors.
<a href="http://bochs.sourceforge.net/"; target="_blank">Bochs</a>, pronounced "Box", does what VPC and RealPC do -- emulate the whole PC. However, it is reputedly slow.
There is also an open-source equivalent of SoftWindows:
<a href="http://www.winehq.com"; target="_blank">WINE</a>, It currently runs only on x86 hardware, but a combination of Bochs and Mac-native WINE might be possible.
So we will have options.
The main commercial competitors to VPC have been RealPC and SoftWindows, which <a href="http://www.fwb.com"; target="_blank">FWB</a> is exploring the revival of. I'm doing these descriptions from memory:
RealPC works just like VirtualPC -- it emulates the PC (PeeCee?) hardware.
However, SoftWindows emulates only the x86 processor, and only does so for the apps -- all Windows stuff is handled by PPC-native code.
There are also some open-source competitors.
<a href="http://bochs.sourceforge.net/"; target="_blank">Bochs</a>, pronounced "Box", does what VPC and RealPC do -- emulate the whole PC. However, it is reputedly slow.
There is also an open-source equivalent of SoftWindows:
<a href="http://www.winehq.com"; target="_blank">WINE</a>, It currently runs only on x86 hardware, but a combination of Bochs and Mac-native WINE might be possible.
So we will have options.
Comments
<strong>What alternatives are there?
</strong><hr></blockquote>
A cheap PC as a second computer?
It will always be quicker than any emulation software, though you lose the advantage of easy drag and drop etc between the two environments.
As to FWB's products, they seem to be more or less dead (don't ask me why).
<strong>WINE is an implementation of the Win32 APIs for Linux/x86.</strong><hr></blockquote>
And other Unix-like OSes that run on x86 hardware.
Check under "CPU Emulation" in the <a href="http://www.winehq.com/about/index.php?status"; target="_blank">WINE status page</a>.
The only work on OSX-native WINE done so far has been on Winelib, which is for linking to Windows apps compiled as Linux, etc. apps. Thus, one can compile a Windows app with gcc and link a PPC-native version of Winelib to it, and it will run, though perhaps with some source-code tweaking like endianness conversion.
What I had in mind was an open-source version of SoftWindows: WINE would be PPC-native, but all app code would execute in Bochs, and hand Windows calls over to WINE to handle.