GaryK

http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/

Iain Young

Erm, why?

No doubt it's a clever bit of software, but If I wanted a mac os I'd buy a mac. Or am I missing something here?

angrynorth

OS X is amazing Iain, thats why people want to be able to put it on a PC.

Unfortunatley Pear PC runs at approximately 500 times slower than it would on a Mac, because the emulator is in its infancy. It could be quite good in the future though.

Iain Young

I don't doubt that OSX is a nice bit of software, (in fact I know that it is). I just don't see the point of trying to emulate a mac so that you can run it on the PC.

It's never going to be as quick or reliable as running it on the real hardware....

angrynorth

That is true, I think it just stems from people who want OSX but don't want to replace their hardware. Personally I don't think that it will end up getting anywhere near as good.

Virtual PC 7 though, that will be very good. I will be able to run Windows on my G5 and instead of it being software accelerated, it will be hardware accelerated using altivec. Performance is expected to equal normal PC's and that argument about not getting a Mac because of games should fade away as they will run all the same games and at almost the same speeds!

stevencotton

Virtual machines are usually used for cross-platform development, or even just conforming to the company email client which isn't available natively for your chosen OS, rather than using it as a seperate machine outright. Cheaper than a seperate machine.

Iain Young

I know that, as we use these types of program at work (we develop software for Win32, Linux, SCO, Aix, HP, Mainframe, .Net etc etc). They're useful for rough testing, but no replacement for testing on the real hardware IMHO. We've had faults which don't show up on the emulators, but which do appear on the real machines. We've also had faults that appear on the emulators but not on the real hardware.

Basically, you need the real hardware to debug properly.

stevencotton

Absolutely, but if you have a bunch of developers all working in a large project it's a lot easier for them to prototye that way before the codebase is pushed out to the staging area, where those problems you mention can be brought to light.

Iain Young

True

Markus

Ah, this is probably what TechTV were babbling on about the other evening.

Echo what others said, it's good for just quickly running an app. For example, I have Virtual PC for Mac here, and I run windows 2000 in it, as our software can be installed on a 2000 server, and I need to know how to configure things, so it's handy for that.

It would be nice to see OS X for Intel, but I doubt we'd see that from Apple, they know that their primary market is selling machines, and if they created X for Intel then quite a few people would possibly dump windows, and use X instead, on their existing hardware, thus negating the requirement of a macintosh computer, and therefore less £ for Apple.

GaryK

Yep Ive used for virtual machines for x-platform dev work and to be honest they suck, nowhere near quick enough and keep promising to be, Im running virtual pc 6 for mac which is average, its always ' o the next version will be quicker' been saying it for years and its always been utter bollocks!

angrynorth

I'm not so sure about this next version, 7 is supposed to use the hardware rather than software. Theoretically it should be much faster. They need to hurry up with it anyway, 6 won't work with G5's.

ozzy

PC hardware is cheaper and easier to get hold of than Mac. Also gives another option to PC users who are perhaps fed up with Windows.

Emulation will always have restrictions over native raw code, but it's better than nothing. Pity Apple won't develop an Intel platform version of it's OS as it might finally kick M$ off it's perch. But then Apple seem to want everyone to run their hardware anyway.

I've used virtual machines here too and I thought they sucked big time. They're fine for somethings - i.e. running non-native apps, but Terminal Services is a much better solution for that. Some of our Developers have used it to save us building lots of different machine platforms, but you're right in saying it's no substitute for the real thing.

Stefan