PearPC - PowerPC Architecture Emulator for PC = Mac OS X on a PC

Well, there are some tools and others. At least one of the ones you mentioned kinda rang a bell in my head. I didn't think that the exact list was that important, so I removed it. The question, I think, on how to create the image, was legit, so I left that in. No offense meant. I just don't want a thread in the Apple News, Rumours & Discussion forum to turn into some kind of 'howto' for PC users who want OS X 'for free' and on PC hardware. ... We gotta keep Apple alive and healthy. ;-)
 
I believe this kind of emulation is (really) far from perfect. Well, I still have to smile after I've "seen" people asking for advanced features like implementing altivec 2 support. Currently, I am creating a HD image of my system, but I from several reports I gathered the performance is as worse as trying to run OSX on a 68K system (currently no harm is done to our favourite enterprise with the fruit shaped logo). But it is still a big step forward, months ago PPC emulators were considered as impossible.
Personally I am left in the dark of its usefullness. I mean, OSX is all about style, useability or if you get one of the pro machines, its all about high performance applications, which require high processing power.

Maybe we shouldn't see this developement in such a negative light. Maybe some PC users get a (small) taste of Mac OSX and get curious how it will perform on the real machine. (Even if it is a small percent. Not everyone is downloading PPC emulation software of source forge, and how they acquired the OSX CDs then is also questionable)
There is no much harm done, real hardware > emulation. Years have passed since the introduction of VPC and it is still performing slow on current machines. And thats a commercial product.
 
Well ifrit, i DO see the benefits of PPC emulation on x86. Ever since i 'switched' (and even before that), i prefer using a macintosh instead of a PC. Now most places i go to donot have macs, like my college totally runs PCs. Now I create projects (such as C language programs for my CS course) on my mac, so I would like to take my 'copy' of PPC with me to college on a DVD so that i wouldnt have to modify the code on location. Plus it'd be kinda cool you know ;) That is 'if' they manage to improve PearPC further. The second release already seems a lot better at performance.
All in all, I'd like to see this product evolve.
 
rubicon said:
Why doesn't someone build Aqua on top of Darwin X86?
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Because someone would have to build Quartz first. Aqua is just the theme and style of the windows and controls. Quartz is what actually puts color on your screen instead of console text.

I'm pretty sure XFree86 or X.org runs on Darwin, so users can get graphical mode on Darwin x86. But that still isn't as good as Quartz/Aqua - you lose hardware accelerated desktop, and although there are hardware accelerated drivers from Nvidia and ATI for x86 Unix OSes, I'm not sure if it works in Darwin.
 
I'd like to politely remind everyone that Apple did in fact port iTunes to Windows and made their Music Store available to Windows users, the Windows compatible version of iPod has been available much longer than the 2 above mentioned product/service. The result was more iPod and music sales for Apple. So is it really a bad thing?
 
Lycander said:
I'm pretty sure XFree86 or X.org runs on Darwin, so users can get graphical mode on Darwin x86. But that still isn't as good as Quartz/Aqua - you lose hardware accelerated desktop, and although there are hardware accelerated drivers from Nvidia and ATI for x86 Unix OSes, I'm not sure if it works in Darwin.
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So it's the Quartz engine that needs porting and that's probably where legal problems with Apple might arise?

Regardless, if there were Quartz/Darwin all apps would need to be recompiled for X86.
 
rubicon said:
So it's the Quartz engine that needs porting and that's probably where legal problems with Apple might arise?
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Has nothing to do with legality. It's a technical problem. First, we'd need video drivers to make good use of the video cards. ATI and Nvidia do not publicly publish the needed info for anyone to write drivers. Without 3d hardware acceleration, the OSX desktop would be dreadful. Enough info about Quartz is out there that independent developers probably could create a new engine that's at least source compatible with Quartz if not exactly the same.

rubicon said:
Regardless, if there were Quartz/Darwin all apps would need to be recompiled for X86.
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Well, look at it this way. All apps would have to be recompiled for 64-bits once OSX becomes a native 64-bit OS. Granted it can still execute in 32-bit mode, there will still be a push to get all software working in 64-bit mode.
 
All the 68K emulators, for the PPC or x86 platform, required a ROM-image, dumped from a genuine 68K machine in order to function.

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but isn't this exactly why OSX doesn't run natively on other (non-Apple) PPC computers (built for Debian etc Linux) without MoL?

Does this mean that PearPC INCLUDES the ROM dump? If so, is it not illegal?
 
texanpenguin said:
All the 68K emulators, for the PPC or x86 platform, required a ROM-image, dumped from a genuine 68K machine in order to function.

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but isn't this exactly why OSX doesn't run natively on other (non-Apple) PPC computers (built for Debian etc Linux) without MoL?

Does this mean that PearPC INCLUDES the ROM dump? If so, is it not illegal?
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You seem never to have heard of Open Firmware or New World Macintoshes. The Macintosh Toolbox ROM is required only to Old Word Macs, both 68k and PPC. The functions served by the firmware Toolbox ROM in Old World Macs are served by the ROM file in the MacOS 8/9/Classic System Folder in New World Macs. The ROM file is installed with the rest of 8/9/Classic. MacOS X 10.x requires neither a firmware ROM nor a ROM file. It is a violation of the MacOS X end user license to run the OS on non-Apple hardware. If the user is so inclined to break the law, there are few if any technical impediments to doing so.
 
MisterMe said:
You seem never to have heard of Open Firmware or New World Macintoshes. The Macintosh Toolbox ROM is required only to Old Word Macs, both 68k and PPC. The functions served by the firmware Toolbox ROM in Old World Macs are served by the ROM file in the MacOS 8/9/Classic System Folder in New World Macs. The ROM file is installed with the rest of 8/9/Classic. MacOS X 10.x requires neither a firmware ROM nor a ROM file. It is a violation of the MacOS X end user license to run the OS on non-Apple hardware. If the user is so inclined to break the law, there are few if any technical impediments to doing so.
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Thanks! You cleared that right up. I had heard of Open Firmware, but you've made it make far more sense now.
 
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