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Has anyone heard of this *supposed* Mac-hardware emulator for PC that can do OSX? It's been around for a year and I always heard that "it worked, although slowly" or something else that otherwise deterred me from trying it. (Completely besides the fact that I don't *own* OSX and didn't want to download 1.5GB of it..)
So I went to the site just to check out the status of the project and they now have G4 emulation in the latest "CVS" version (more or less meaning, the version that the developers are working on but aren't confident enough to call it a "release") which will provide a giant speed boost..
Point is, I'm here to tell you that at this moment I'm typing this in MacOSX, running inside WinXP on my PC.. Yes, really. I have network connections and all and it works pretty damn well. Not that slow at all. Granted, the screen does not refresh as well as it would on an actual Mac, and the makeshift internet connection is pretty slow but it works! I'm shocked, really.
The only way to get CD-ROM access is to make an ISO of the CD you want (or use Nero or something and 'burn' an ISO) and then mount the ISO as a drive image in the emulator. Basically, no swapping discs. To get the internet to work, I had to pretty well disassemble my Windows network including my ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) and firewall.
PearPC on my machine (A Sempron 3100+ [running at 2.025 GHz], 512 DDR-RAM, Radeon 9600xt/128MB video [which matters NOT in the emu]) it emulates a G3 processor running at anywhere between 800 and 950 MHz (it seems to change everytime I run it) with 128MB of RAM. It's almost like having a 386-16MHz again but of course, I blame that completely on the stability of the emulator and not at all on OSX itself.
I haven't gotten to use many programs because it seems sorta like a lot of things use the internet connection, and let's face it people, without an internet connection a computer is pretty useless nowadays. I just got the network up and running where I can mess with it. I wanna mess with iMovie but any clips I imported via ISO from Windows are all Divx (heh). Sherlock seems interesting but it did NOTHING without an internet connection. (I sorta know what it does from back in the day when I friggin studyed MacOS in hopes of getting a Mac.)
So, all in all, this works way better than I expected. As I said, I'm surprised it worked at all. When I get the Altivec (aka: G4) instruction-version of it, it should be more-than-a-bit more responsive, I should think. Of course I can't use it as my primary OS but I'm going to try to use this as I do Windows and see how I like it. MacOS is *much more* intuitive and user-friendly than Unix/Linux despite it's Unix underpinnings. If anything, this is at least my chance to see what MacOS is all about, but I know in my heart there is no real substitute for an actual Macintosh.
So I went to the site just to check out the status of the project and they now have G4 emulation in the latest "CVS" version (more or less meaning, the version that the developers are working on but aren't confident enough to call it a "release") which will provide a giant speed boost..
Point is, I'm here to tell you that at this moment I'm typing this in MacOSX, running inside WinXP on my PC.. Yes, really. I have network connections and all and it works pretty damn well. Not that slow at all. Granted, the screen does not refresh as well as it would on an actual Mac, and the makeshift internet connection is pretty slow but it works! I'm shocked, really.
The only way to get CD-ROM access is to make an ISO of the CD you want (or use Nero or something and 'burn' an ISO) and then mount the ISO as a drive image in the emulator. Basically, no swapping discs. To get the internet to work, I had to pretty well disassemble my Windows network including my ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) and firewall.
PearPC on my machine (A Sempron 3100+ [running at 2.025 GHz], 512 DDR-RAM, Radeon 9600xt/128MB video [which matters NOT in the emu]) it emulates a G3 processor running at anywhere between 800 and 950 MHz (it seems to change everytime I run it) with 128MB of RAM. It's almost like having a 386-16MHz again but of course, I blame that completely on the stability of the emulator and not at all on OSX itself.
I haven't gotten to use many programs because it seems sorta like a lot of things use the internet connection, and let's face it people, without an internet connection a computer is pretty useless nowadays. I just got the network up and running where I can mess with it. I wanna mess with iMovie but any clips I imported via ISO from Windows are all Divx (heh). Sherlock seems interesting but it did NOTHING without an internet connection. (I sorta know what it does from back in the day when I friggin studyed MacOS in hopes of getting a Mac.)
So, all in all, this works way better than I expected. As I said, I'm surprised it worked at all. When I get the Altivec (aka: G4) instruction-version of it, it should be more-than-a-bit more responsive, I should think. Of course I can't use it as my primary OS but I'm going to try to use this as I do Windows and see how I like it. MacOS is *much more* intuitive and user-friendly than Unix/Linux despite it's Unix underpinnings. If anything, this is at least my chance to see what MacOS is all about, but I know in my heart there is no real substitute for an actual Macintosh.
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Arkansas
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