Darwine! WINE for Mac OS X is coming

proud ibook owner 2k2 · January 24, 2004 11:29AM

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?

bunge · January 24, 2004 11:49AM

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.

proud ibook owner 2k2 · January 24, 2004 11:52AM

Quote:

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.

ast3r3x · January 24, 2004 11:57AM

Quote:

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.

proud ibook owner 2k2 · January 24, 2004 11:59AM

Quote:

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..

nebagakid · January 24, 2004 12:03PM

this seems very interesting.. .Do you need a Windows license?

proud ibook owner 2k2 · January 24, 2004 12:04PM

Quote:

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.

ghost_user_name · January 24, 2004 12:58PM

Quote:

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).

silentechoes · January 24, 2004 1:57PM

Ouch I missed the part about bochs that kinda sucks

proud ibook owner 2k2 · January 24, 2004 2:05PM

Quote:

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...

ghost_user_name · January 24, 2004 2:54PM

Quote:

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.

silentechoes · January 24, 2004 3:19PM

It still will be interesting to see how it compares to VPC though.

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.

extras.rsrc · January 24, 2004 3:31PM

At least it's not emulating Windows and then running the applications on top of it. It's cool to see more work like this being done though because some people need to run programs that still aren't available for the Mac. I'm even happier though that I don't need to.

macserverx · January 24, 2004 3:36PM

That's kinda what I was thinking. This makes much better sense from a monetary and otherwise standpoint. You don't have to have a copy of Windows. I would think of this as a proof-of-concept rather than usable code. And if you look at the WINE site, they don't suggest that they have much of the Windows API complete and recompiles are also necessary for apps, so this is far from being worthwhile, except on open-source code.

wmf · January 24, 2004 3:59PM

If they're smart they'll use qemu instead of Bochs.

This is a major long-term project, but it looks like they're on the right track.

aquatic · January 24, 2004 4:06PM

Bochs is crap. I wish Orangemicro would make PC cards again.

proud ibook owner 2k2 · January 24, 2004 4:13PM

Awesome points guys. I knew this would become a popular topic. I can't wait until it's out of CVS and it has an Aqua GUI to work with. That would also be cool if it would run without Aqua so if the use wanted they could

run it on pure Darwin with such Unix WMs as KDE or GNOME. That's what I'd wanna do.

silentechoes · January 24, 2004 4:56PM

I was going to take it for a spin and see what they got done so far but I cannot get it to install with their script. I got it to compile from source but I am still working with it.

OT: Just wondering, if this is going to become a regular topic could you take the caps and exclamations out of the title?

stoo · January 24, 2004 7:49PM

Quote:

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.

Quote:

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...

whisper · January 25, 2004 6:16PM

Quote:

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?

mmmpie · January 25, 2004 7:42PM

Darwine cant run windows exe's on OS X at the moment.

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.