Winelib on MacosX?

Since Wine is not an emulator, it will only work correctly on Intel-compatible chips. It basically allows for actual execution of Windows binaries.

There are two solutions for Wine to work with OSX on a PowerPC. Emulate all the functions of the x86 chip. This would be a HUGE project and not very feasible (for an opensource colaborative effort that is). The second solution would be to have everybody who makes Windows binaries to recompile their applications for Windows on the PowerPC, and I don't even want to think about the problems with that.

Now if you recompiled OSX for x86, then there probably wouldn't be much of a problem getting WINE to work on OSX.

http://wine.codeweavers.com/fom-meta/cache/27.html
 
As Cadre said, Wine only implements the API. The API is no use if your program is compiled for a completely different chip than the one in your computer - it runs only on Linux under x86, not any other architecture.

Any program that lets you run x86 binaries on a non-x86 architecture will have to be a full PC hardware emulator. If you want to pay money, this means Virtual PC. If you want to wait or become an open source developer and help port code, this means Bochs.

I don't know whether there is any work being done on Bochs for OS X, although it does apparently run under Classic Mac OS, as well as UNIX with X-Windows. Given that, it seems reasonable that there should before too too long be an OS X port.

http://www.guisoft-corp.com/bochs.htm
 
This is an even worse idea than porting gtk to Quartz.

Great, all we need is a reason for windows developers to recompile their apps to OS X using WINE instead of porting them. Not like OS X's UI uniformity problem is bad enough.
 
It would be much better to run Bochs straight on MacOS X, rather than through classic, as you are going to get a major performance hit otherwise. The source code for Bochs, which happens to open source (thanks to Mandrake Soft) is available at ftp://ftp.bochs.com/.

There is another project going on the x86 platform known as Plex86 (http://www.plex86.org). This is not an emulator, but rather a virtual machine. There appears to be indications that bochs support may be added to Plex86, though I will have to confirm my info before you can quote me on that.

[Edited by ajmas on 01-17-2001 at 05:39 PM]
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top