This rival kicks VPC's Ass

[Novaz04]

http://wired.com/Articles: news/technology/0,1282,64914,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2

Companys link: http://www.Transitive.com/

Could this be the real thing? No need for stupid horribly slow VPC, and instead a program that could support a PC game. The unity between PC software and Mac software. Now people have absolutely no reason to use silly excuses like "Macs don't run my software".

Siadly though, it's a two way street, this could also bring buget stricken graphics people to go to PC's and still use their once "Mac only" software.

[ September 17, 2004: Message edited by: Novaz04 ]

[bedouin]

I read somewhere that this is really only emulation of command-line UNIX apps.  Their focus is on server applications.

There's a lot of marketing crap here, and not a lot of evidence.  You're better off waiting for the Darwine project to mature, and if the developer's schedule doesn't go too far off course, that may be around the same time the next version of VPC comes out.

And Mac-using graphics folks aren't using Macs because of the programs necessarily, but for the overall experience, which can never be emulated (usefully, anyway).

Beside, even if Transitive's product is an amazing piece of software, there will still be a place for VPC, since this is only emulating APIs not an entire OS.

[worker201]

quote:Originally posted by bedouin:
And Mac-using graphics folks aren't using Macs because of the programs necessarily, but for the overall experience, which can never be emulated (usefully, anyway)

True, true, true.  But I can tell you that Illustrator CS behaves differently in OSX than it does in WinXP.  The difference is the way Windows and Macs handle really fucking huge files.  WinXP, which doesn't give access violation errors anymore, just thrashes around for hours and hours, effectively crashing the program.  The Mac is much more likely to give up, and tell you that your memory isn't going to cut it.

Case study:
Home: iBook, 900 MHz G3, 640 MB RAM
Work: Dell, 2.4 GHz P4, 1.5 GB RAM

Task - using Illustrator CS, open a PostScript file (over 1 million lines long, but only 25MB size) and save in AI format 1)with pdf compatibility or 2)without pdf compatibility.

RESULTS:
Work: both save operations resulted in crashes, of the kind where Illustrator remained unresponsive for about 2 hours, and was then force-quitted.

Home: Saving the file with pdf compatibility ran for 20 minutes and then gave a memory error, and Illustrator closed by itself.  Without pdf compatibility save was completed in about 25 minutes.

Winner - the Mac
(although I have a few un-nice things to say about the pdf format)

Holy fuck, I just majorly hijacked this thread!

One thousand pardons!

I've never used a virtualPC program on a Mac.  The only emulators I have used have been totally inadequate.  So my faith is extremely low.

[Novaz04]

What's the Darwin Project

[bedouin]

http://darwine.opendarwin.org//

[worker201]

Darwin project or Darwine project?

heh, I can answer both.

Darwin is the open source BSD variant for PPC architecture that OSX is based on.  If something is supposed to work in Darwin, it will work on a Mac, in theory.

Darwine is the wine project for Darwin.  Wine, in typical gnu fashion, stands for 'Wine Is Not an Emulator'.  But that's only technical, for newbie purposes, it functions as an emulator.  Using it, people have been known to run Windows programs, like Word and Photoshop on their Linux machines.  It's not perfect, because MS only releases partial APIs, so the rest has to be guessed and tested.  Anyway, if wine were to run on Darwin, then you could use it on your Mac.  It is not technically an emulator, and thus does not have the same problems that emulators do, like incomplete environments and on-the-fly instruction translation.

Oh, and since wine is open source, and Darwin is open source, Darwine will be open source, which will be free.

Till then, maybe this VPC might be a good idea, if it works.

[ravuya]

QEMU is a much better x86 emulator at this point, anyway. Blazes through a Windows install.

[Aloone_Jonez]

quote:Originally posted by worker201:
Wine, in typical gnu fashion, stands for 'Wine Is Not an Emulator'.

Well it isn't a CPU emulator if it's running an 86x Windows program on an 86x processor even if it's running under Linux instead Windows.

 

quote:Originally posted by worker201:
But that's only technical, for newbie purposes, it functions as an emulator.  Using it, people have been known to run Windows programs, like Word and Photoshop on their Linux machines.  

If Wine is "emulating" anything it's just the Windows API.

 

quote:Originally posted by worker201:
It's not perfect, because MS only releases partial APIs, so the rest has to be guessed and tested.

Exactly    Microsoft


 

quote:Originally posted by worker201:
Anyway, if wine were to run on Darwin, then you could use it on your Mac.  It is not technically an emulator, and thus does not have the same problems that emulators do, like incomplete environments and on-the-fly instruction translation.

If you were to run 86x programs on a Mac you would need an emulator. Wine is not an emulator when run on a PC but it would have to be run with an emulator to run 86x programs on a Mac. It would be a lot better than using a traditional emulator where you need a copy of Windows, as Wine's Windows API emulation librarys would be used instead.

You can also compile programs with Winelib a GPL library that "emulates" the Windows API under linux.

What is Winelib

 

quote:
Another benefit is that a Winelib application can relatively easily be recompiled on a non-Intel architecture and run there without the need for a slow software emulation of the processor.

 

quote:
Oh, and since wine is open source, and Darwin is open source, Darwine will be open source, which will be free.

As well as being free all open source software is portable unless it's written in Assembly or Visual Basic.

 

quote:
Till then, maybe this VPC might be a good idea, if it works.

Don't you need Windows to run Mac software under Virtual PC?

[Refalm]

quote:Ravuya: QEMU is a much better x86 emulator at this point, anyway. Blazes through a Windows install.

Hello Ruvaya  

How well does QEMU do when you're using a performance heave program on your virtual Windows installation?