WINE->Windows compatibility

[jazzman45]

For those who don't know, WINE is a program that allows operating systems other than windows run win32 apps natively.

There is a project to allow this to be cross-platform, specifically for the mac!

If there are any developers out there, this would be a great project to help out on!

here's the URL:
http://darwine.sourceforge.net/index.php

or for the lazy ones, a screenshot:
http://darwine.sourceforge.net/images/CaptureWine.gif

By the way, there is a development version out. (not for the faint of heart)

-tyler

 

[Westside guy]

I've played with Wine on Linux on a PC box; wasted a lot of my time on it, matter of fact. Wine is an attempt to emulate (despite the name: Wine Is Not an Emulator) the Windows APIs without using any Windows code.

People should be aware that there are a LOT of programs - many or most of the current versions, in fact - that do not run acceptably well or at all under Wine. The Wine developers always seem to be working a version or three behind the current Windows API; plus the sections they have done are for the most part only partially complete.

Matter of fact a company called Codeweavers saw a business opportunity in this. They sell "Crossover Office", which is Wine with some of their own libraries that allows MS Office to run. I doubt the Codeweavers stuff will get ported to the Mac.

Another company called Transgaming sells a modified version of Wine that supports some of the DirectX graphics layer.

There's a whole list of apps and how they run under Wine: http://www.winehq.com/site/supported_applications. Often the ones reported to run need a fair bit of tweaking first.

 

[Simon Liquid]

They use Bochs

As Westside guy said, WINE is not in fact an emulator. It just duplicates the Windows API calls. This means that to run code compiled for PCs on a PowerPC based Mac, you need something to fake a x86 processor.

They use Bochs which is the only open source solution I know of. It isn't very efficient though. I lack personal experience (was stymied in my attempts to get windows on the darn thing) but from the research I've done the latest version of Windows usable on a Bochs emulator running on a Mac is Windows 95. Now perhaps WINE has somewhat less overhead, but still there's a whole lot of development that will need to be done before you can run any good games on it, or a recent version of AutoCAD.

 

[FattyMembrane]

from what the darwine site said, because the emulation layer will only need to power the wine libraries and not windows itself, there should be a nice speed gain over running a program in windows in bochs. as people on the darwine forums have noted, qemu has shown much better performance benchmarks than bochs and a switch to that emulation layer should yield even more speed improvements.

any program made for doing real work has a mac version or equivalent program on the mac. this effort should solve the problem of quirky little niche apps that a few people find crucial, and will not switch to the mac without.

on a related note, those of you looking to play old dos games should check out the osx port of dosbox