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Technology (Apple) Businesses Apple Technology

Replacement for "Microsoft's" Virtual PC? 136

Posted by pudge from the eumlate-me-baby dept.
Rien writes "I saw this BusinessWeek article referenced over at MacSlash. The author makes the case for Apple utilizing the Bochs Open Source IA-32 (x86) PC emulator to help counter Microsoft's recent purchase of Virtual PC from Connectix." I looked at Bochs, and maybe I R Dum, but I couldn't figure out how to install Windows on it.
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Replacement for "Microsoft's" Virtual PC? More

Replacement for "Microsoft's" Virtual PC?

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  • Potentially more interesting than Apple just using Bochs, would be if they combined Bochs and Wine and came out with a system that could run (some) Windows binaries on OSX without the need for Windows at all!

    • Yeah, I can imagine that - Apple releasing a second-rate, slow, unreliable, unstable windows emulator whilst Microsoft continue to sell the much quicker, much more reliable, much more stable Virtual PC. They'll get great publicity for that!

      Tut, Essex people! <g>

      • Re:Wine Bochs? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by stu_coates ( 156061 )

        It's not quite as crazy as it seems: the use of something like Wine would mean that the "Windows API" would run at native (PowerPC) speeds while the rest of the application would be emulated. It all depends on the type of application of course - something with a rich user interface may experience pretty good speeds as it spends a lot of time in the Windows (Wine) code, but you'd have to be mad to run the x86 version of RC5 cracking client on it which use mostly just user mode code.

        • Re:Wine Bochs? (Score:2, Insightful)

          by WatertonMan ( 550706 )
          Wha? Wine runs native under Unix. It isn't emulating anything. If you mean doing something like Wine where Apple rewrites Windows in PowerPC code you'd have a point. But that'd be hugely expensive and time consuming. Further what would Apple get? Merely the ability to run Windows programs slower than Windows. Why not pour those same resources into making applications that do what the Microsoft applications do, only better? (And with native Aqua interfaces)

          There's nothing wrong with VPC. I use it occasionally myself. But I honestly can't see Apple wasting time writing an emulator. Further I doubt that Microsoft is going to kill VPC development. If anything we may get better VPC performance due to it all being under the same roof.

          If Apple was going to do something, it'd probably go buy the old source code to SoftPC (a competitor to VPC from a few years ago) and then improve it. I can't see them using Bochs which really isn't targetted at the same market as VPC.

          • Re:Wine Bochs? (Score:4, Insightful)

            by clarkcox3 ( 194009 ) <slashdot@clarkcox.com> on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @02:02PM (#5434092) Homepage

            If Wine were ported to the PPC, then the x86 instructions *would* have to be emulated. For example, they could have the following situation:

            1. An x86 emulator begins to run an x86 emulator
            2. When that emulator sees that a Win32 API call (or even an ANSI C library call) is to be made, it actually calls a PPC implementation of that API call
            3. control is then returned back to the emulated x86 code

            If done well, you could run most windows apps out of the box, and run them much faster than if they were purely emulated (since the Win32 API's, and any other API's where it made sense, would be native PPC code, and not emulated x86 code).

            • Admittedly a JIT compiler mixed with a port of Wine would be good. (Is most of Wine in C, or is it a mix of C and assembly?) However I'm *not* sure it is worth the effort. Further it wouldn't be a strict port simply because of the issues regarding byte ordering and so forth.

              What you describe is basically what Apple did with the transition from the 68k to the PPC. However even now there is still a lot of emulated code.

    • Red Bochs? (Score:2, Funny)

      by oscast ( 653817 )
      hmmmmm... Why not Red Bochs? hmmmm?

      • Re:Red Bochs? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by KurtP ( 64223 )
        This is funnier than you might think. Back when I worked at Apple, we had various names for the various APIs in Mac OS X. There was this big block diagram, you see, with colored boxes. The Classic mode was the Blue Box, for instance, and Cocoa was called Yellow Box. Carbon was known as Green Box (halfway between blue and yellow), and Red Box was our proposed name for a Windows emulation environment. Wow, great minds...
    • Boxed Wine?

      Nah... that stuff is gross.

    • Re:Wine Bochs? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by larry bagina ( 561269 )
      it's not so far fetched, given that's basically how the 68k emulator worked (some tool calls written in native PPC, some still in 68k and emulated).

      Of course, having access to your own source code is a *big* help. So it's something MS could do, not something Apple/Bochs/WINE could do.

      Anyhow, once the world moves to .net clr, it won't matter if it's Windows.NET on a P4, rotor with OpenBSD on a Sparc III Ultra, mono/linux on a 486, or OSX/.NET on a PPC. right? :)

    • Re:Wine Bochs? = RedBox (Score:3, Interesting)

      by vlad30 ( 44644 )
      The original road map included Bluebox (OS9 app emulater) yellowBox for OSX and RedBox a x86 app executor either on Intel or PPC emulated i.e. WINE type, I beleive it was dropped due to VPC already serving this market Now is maybe an oppotunity to bring this back

      (yes I even had this OS that shipped from apple that ran on Intel had an apple in the top left corner but came in a NEXT box)
      • There was a lot of speculation about 'red box' but there was never any information released to suggest that it even existed. If it did exist, it was nothing more than a pipe dream.

        What you may be thinking of was the Yellow Box for Windows, which was basically supposed to be the Cocoa API implemented on Windows. Don't know why they canned it, but I could speculate.

        -fred

  • VirtualPC vs. Bochs (Score:3, Interesting)

    by capmilk ( 604826 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @12:37PM (#5433421)
    I'd love to use Bochs simply because it is non-MS open source ware. But a performance comparison between VPC 6 and the latest Bochs release made me buy VPC. The difference is *huge*. Sadly, I can't imagine how Bochs could ever gain enough speed to be a real contender.
    • I wonder if something could be done with Wine and Bochs to to get windows applications to run on Mac with better performance?
    • The problem is that VPC uses emulation modes in the hardware to run x86 code at close-to-native speeds, bochs is entirely software emulation.

      Now before you respond and say, "You're screwball! VPC is nowhere near native speed!", you should note that the biggest bottleneck in VPC isn't the CPU, isn't the memory, it's not even the hard disk emulation. It's the graphics. Graphics speed in VPC is terrible, and we all know that what we really respond to is "perceived" speed, and graphics speed is probably the #1 element of perceived speed.

      Therefore, the best thing MS could do for VPC is to port windows' GFX code to native PPC, complete with AltiVec enhancements. For even better speed, they could just port XP itself to Mac OS X as a VM environment where all XP code would be native and only user apps would run in x86 emulation.

      Whether or not they do this is a big fat question mark. If they do, they run the risk of pushing on the fencers right into switcher-land. If they don't, everyone will get PO'd and say "Why the hey didn't you do that?"

      Just my 2 cents.
      • > If they don't, everyone will get PO'd and say "Why the hey didn't you do that?"

        Oh, come on now. I don't even expect them to be shipping a real version of VPC after a year or two.

        I *do* expect them to take the emulation environment, paste an app (say Microsoft Access) into it, and then sell the resulting sludge as an application. In the blink of an eye, they get to 'support' the Mac with one of their applications, and at the same time prove that the Mac is an order of magnitude slower than the PC, thus luring more people to abandon the platform.

        -fred

  • Pur-lease. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by iMMersE ( 226214 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @12:39PM (#5433429) Homepage
    Just because Microsoft bought VPC, we should boycott it? Come on people, it's not as though Connectix offered it for free, or with the source. Bochs just doesn't match up to VPC for speed or stability. Just the best tool for the job. In this case, there is no competition.
    • Just _use_ the best tool for the job.

      Heeee. Ironic, since my previous post to this was telling someone off for their spelling.

    • Re:Pur-lease. (Score:5, Informative)

      by krray ( 605395 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @01:12PM (#5433678)
      Um, yeah, the *REASON* I use VirtualPC (for DOS to access accounting no less -- which I have ZERO intention on replacing anytime soon) ... was to get AWAY from Microsoft.

      Interesting that with every revision of Windows the DOS layer (and printing) changed enough that it required minor tweaks to MAJOR re-writes of code to make it work seemlessly across the platforms.

      Interesting that my original 1992 code in VirtualPC (DOS) had no issues at all. The accounting program used is a custom job and can easily handle payroll in all 50 US States (which we need/do). In addition there has been added/custom in-house programming to add functionality to cover ACH (Automated Clearning House -- direct deposit) and IDES (Illinois Department of Employment Security). Functionality that re-working in a Windows package is non-trivial ... and NO Windows package can handle our payroll and jobcosting needs/wants.

      VirtualPC on the Mac was my "out". Now with updates to OS X VirtualPC may die REQUIRING a update to VPC. A normal update, from Microsoft, can (and will) very easily just DISABLE DOS, Windows 95, or anything else I may decide I want to run. Boycott? Oh yeah...

      • Obviously.... (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        ...you haven't tried theming or even running programs in Classic or Even OSX.0.4, .1, .2,.....

        I guess .x is a major revision, though. Damn Microsoft, Microsoft evil for futzing with DOS support! They should save incompatibility problems for minor revs to the entire OS that breaks ever time and charge for them too! Bastards!
      • Boycott? No, no. "Boycott" is a Nintendo Gameboy emulator... :)
      • Um, yeah, the *REASON* I use VirtualPC (for DOS to access accounting no less -- which I have ZERO intention on replacing anytime soon) ... was to get AWAY from Microsoft.

        All together now....Change is good.

        Functionality that re-working in a Windows package is non-trivial ...

        That's where your entire approach to this is going wrong...

        You should not simply think of 're-working' the software (in the sense of replicating the way the application behaves), you analyze it and see how it could be better done differently. With something so old that it was implimented in DOS it's all but beyond doubt that you'll need to look at re-inventing the solution.

        Times change - accounting practices and ways of doing business evolve.

        and NO Windows package can handle our payroll and jobcosting needs/wants.

        While I agree that the majority of off the shelf accounting solutions are very poor - never the less: tosh and piffle. And I say this as someone who's just spent 12 months designing and developing the accounting libraries in a commercial software package.

        Unless you have trivial and extremly common requirements, no one out there is going to have a solution that does exactly what you want. You need to build a solution that suits *your situation*, using Visual Basic and Access, or Perl and XML, or Java and SQL - whatever suits your needs best, but it should leverage new technolgies and approaches to business and accounting that your existing solution cannot take advantage of, and of course it should be built with the next wave of software development in mind, so that you don't need to throw out all your old code next time you upgrade (Visual Basic, Java and Perl all being good for this).

        The focus should be on thinking about applications working collaboratively together in an efficent, user friendly, and time and cost savinging manner - in other words - How can I do business better?

        Modern programming languages, graphical interfaces, XML and SQL databases are not just industry hoopla - large modern companies have moved away from DOS based applications and embraced these new technologies not for fun but for profit.

        Those who resist change simply because they are frightened of it, or who lack the vision to see the the scope for better alternatives, will see their organization slowly wither until it is replaced or made irrelevant.

    • Re:Pur-lease. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by fritter ( 27792 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @01:50PM (#5434009)
      You're right - Bochs stinks, and VPC will continue to work fine. For now. The thing to remember is the little war that's erupted between Apple and Redmond on the software development front. Apple is doing its best to get rid of dependence on Microsoft software by developing a lot of stuff in-house - Safari replaces IE, or Keynote replaces PowerPoint, for example. Now there are rumors that Apple is working on an entire Office replacement. This could very well be Microsoft firing back - a lot of people depend on VPC for stuff that hasn't been ported to MacOS, and the prospect of a few reverse switchers could be an excellent bargaining chip for MS in the future. Apple spending a few bucks making Bochs run decently could help them hedge their bets against this kind of thing.

      On top of that, bear in mind that right now VPC will run *any* PC operating system, not just Windows. While it's unlikely MS would discontinue VPC, I don't think anyone here would have a hard time imagining them dropping support for any non-Windows OS. Or even "legacy" OSs like Win95 or 3.1.

      So if I were a VPC user, I wouldn't personally be concerned about this. But politically, Apple may have an interest.
      • The only thing is, Apple would be much better off investing in an x86 to PowerPC JIT compiler and WINE, rather than Bochs (not saying that either is a good idea, mind you, but one is still better than the other). This would allow, with roughly the same amount of work (since the JIT would be needed to make Bochs run reasonably anyway) full emulation of Windows binaries within the Aqua LAF, or at least within Aqua-style windows in a rootless interface. With Bochs is nifty in terms of running any OS you can imagine (except colorForth, haven't made that work yet), VirtualPC's value to Apple is that allows almost-switchers to bring a few key Windows apps with them.
    • The silver lining to Microsoft's purchase is that now it's morally okay to steal VPC.

  • It would be a big project (Score:5, Interesting)

    by plastik55 ( 218435 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @12:40PM (#5433436) Homepage
    Bochs is very crude compared to Virtual PC--it lacks a JIT so it has dismal performance, it doesn't implement clipboard sharing or drag-and-drop between emulated instances of Windows and the outside OS, and it doesn't have accelerated 3D video drivers, just to name a few things off the top of my head. Improving bochs to the point where it could be a replacement for Virtual PC would be a big project for Apple.

    Finally, since most copies of Virtual PC are bundled with a Windows licence, and are sold to people who would not otherwise be buying a Windows license, I don't see how it would be terribly advantageous for Microsoft to kill it.
    • and it doesn't have accelerated 3D video drivers

      Neither does Virtual PC - an older version used to support Glide (3Dfx's API) and map that onto RAVE (Apple's API), but this was dropped and never really followed through on (e.g., a D3D->OpenGL translator would have been the logical step, but they presumably felt it wouldn't be very heavily used by their typical customer).
    • True, MS has no reason to kill it off just yet. They probably won't for a few years.

      But now it has the power to do so, in the future, should they ever choose.
    • I agree, but in 95 Linux was barely usable too.

      I will continue to use Virtual PC 6 on my Mac for now (I use Windows 2000 to control my windows domain controllers and Linux for software development and testing), but I understand the fears created by this purchase and will be testing replacement software where available.

      MS has proven time and time again that they will do anything they can get away with to squash competing platforms.

      Unfortunately in the US, "what they can get away with" seems no longer related to what is legal.

  • Bochs and Installing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RevAaron ( 125240 ) <revaaron AT hotmail DOT com> on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @12:43PM (#5433469) Homepage
    Installing anything onto Bochs is pretty easy, once you have got a basic install (that boots the included FreeDOS) decently. I think there is an OS X dmg that is more or less ready to go. Yes, you do have to edit a config file.

    However, unlike VPC, Bochs runs slower than molasses. Too slow to be useful, IMO. I can't remember how many minutes it took for startx to finally bring up TWM and an xterm on a simple Linux install, but it was a long time, on a dual G4/500. VPC has been very optimized (in general and for the G4) and runs at a usable speed. Hell, it can even utilize OpenGL and Glide cards directly, making some (older, but still) PC-only games run somewhat decently.

    Yes, it'd be nice to have a purely open source emulator, but until Bochs is useful for more than testing (in my case), I won't be using it for anything but a toy.
    • Yeah, Bochs is probably not the right tool for running applications. Bochs does full emulation of the PC architechture (attempt to do at least) which is why it's so slow, but it's also why it's so useful for things like OS kernel development.

      It's far more useful to get "3rd exception" message from bochs, than to see your computer reboot. Also it can give you all the values of different registers, and so on. This is where bochs is really useful.

      • Bochs does full emulation of the PC architechture


        VPC does this also, it's just heavily optimized for the PowerPC. That's why you can run Linux and OpenStep and other OSes easily. Unfortunately I wouldn't be surprised if MS improves" VPC by adding Windows-specific "enhancements" that break support for anything other than WinXP.

    • Re:Bochs and Installing (Score:4, Insightful)

      by rodbegbie ( 4449 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @01:00PM (#5433610) Homepage
      Yes, bochs is a bugger to configure, and slow as all hell to run (I've still to get to the end of a Windows install without giving up after about 10 hours out of frustration)

      But that's exactly why Apple should devote some resources to the project.

      They could take bochs, make speed improvements to it and release the changes back to the community, then create a nice UI to define your machines.

      Bochs isn't a VPC-killer *yet*, but I'm sure with a little Cupertino-assistance it shure could be.

      rOD.
    • VPC has been very optimized (in general and for the G4) and runs at a usable speed. Hell, it can even utilize OpenGL and Glide cards directly, making some (older, but still) PC-only games run somewhat decently.

      I'm curious about this: Connectix's FAQ (http://www.connectix.com/downloadcenter/pdf/vpcm6 _FAQ_eng-intl.pdf) page states that hardware 3D acceleration is not supported in VPC 6. Which card are you able to use? To run which games?
      I've tried Sudden Strike 2 on a Dual GhZ G4. It runs OK, somewhat choppy, but I think multiplayer (with hundreds of units on the map) maps would be unplayable. Tried worms world party, but there is a bug with mouse management that makes it unplayable.

      • I've not used VPC for a while. Perhaps with the move to OS X, VPC lost this ability?

        VPC used to support Voodoo cards for sure, but I don't know what else. The only thing I've ever seen it done on was my girlfriend's rev B iMac (with a Voodoo2 in the mezzanine slot). Can't remember what the game was, but it was something we were trying under Glide just to see if it worked. (VPC used to advertise the ability)
        • Thanks for the info... According to their FAQ, VPC has lost this ability, which is a shame (and, if they were able to implement OpenGL/Glide support in Mac OS 8 or 9, why couldn't they on OS X?) I'd like to play Counterstrike on a macintosh, that's for sure... :/

          • Not sure what about OS 9 -> X would've caused tihs, but it seems the most likely. IIRC, My gf was running 8.6 at the time, which was the most recent. In those days, VPC did a lot of dirty tricks that didn't fit in with Apple's new vision (Carbon) of clean code that didn't access hardware directly. While accessing OpenGL/Glide from VPC is certainly quite doable, perhaps at the time they didn't think it was the most important thing to implement compared to just getting out an OS X version. But indeed, a shame to be sure.
      • RTFM. VPC hasn't supported this since version 4 (or was it 3?).

  • The alternatives (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Aram Fingal ( 576822 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @12:44PM (#5433478)
    Well, it looks like SoftWindows, the previous leader in the field before VirtualPC, has not been updated in a while and is classic mac only. http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=177 6&db=mac

    There's also Blue Label but that apparently hasn't been updated to OS X yet either. http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=698 &db=mac

    I have tried Bochs and it looks to me like it needs a lot of work in the area of making the configuration easier but it is supposed to be able to run any x86 OS.
    • If VMWare was smart, they'd make an OS X port. The stuff already runs on Linux, so porting it to OS X shouldn't be that difficult.

      Another 2 cents,

      Queen B
  • In honor of I R Baboon, when he and Weasle got their own show on Cartoon network. Ehem.

    I R Spinning off! I R Spinning off!

    It's funny. Laugh.

  • Bochs is too slow to be usable (Score:3, Informative)

    by imacosx ( 612986 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @12:55PM (#5433569)
    I had no problems installing Bochs on my iMac G3 500 either from source for a Mac OS X UI, or from Fink that provides an X11 UI. Furthermore, running DOS or Linux without X11 from Bochs is acceptable. However, Windows 98 under Bochs is too slow to be usable. Apple could maybe adapt Bochs to Mac OS X, as they did with XFree86.

  • MOL or VMware (Score:3, Interesting)

    by twilight30 ( 84644 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @01:03PM (#5433623) Homepage
    They should talk to both entities. MOL for the PPC translations, VMware for the emulation for x86. One of the final comments in the article noted that 'some other emulation' would be a good choice. Bochs is just too slow. They can figure out the licensing later, but Apple should get started now. Ignoring the licensing for the time being, Bochs' slow performance currently is one hell of an obstacle. I would wonder just how much improvement is really achievable (I know plex86 is still around -- but how viable is it?).

    VMware's stability and success in selling contracts to US Governmental departments is a strong point in my view. The fact that they don't have a PPC version, obviously, is a strike against.

    Oh well. And no, I don't think it's a good idea to have emulations on Macs dominated by MS. Not trolling, but evidently MS is thinking the Connectix technology would be a good thing to add to their .NET strategy or whatever it is called now.

    • Re:MOL or VMware (Score:3, Interesting)

      by GlassHeart ( 579618 )
      They should talk to [...] VMware for the emulation for x86.

      The technique used by VMWare is known as virtualization, which still relies on having an x86 chip to actually process instructions. For VMWare to support the PowerPC, they have to essentially create a new product. MOL and Plex86 also use the same technique.

      Of course, with 1.3 GHz Durons costing just $30 in retail, I wonder why nobody has come up with a x86-on-a-PCI with (a lot less) associated software to solve this problem.

      • And if they went the route of emulating the processor vs virtualization, a massive performance hit would likely be suffered.
      • Sounds a lot like what Orange Micro used to sell for $500 or more--an entire PC (with Intel chip or Intel knock-off) on a PCI board you could put in a Mac. I used to have one.

        Doesn't look like they're selling them any more, though. There's probably not enough of a market, and doing emulation in software (like Virtual PC) is cheaper and more flexible.
  • This is my fav mac subject since it evolved to having a UNIX layer... How about a WIN32 LAYER (not "in a window") !?! not in software but Hardware. ie have an x86 in there too. IFF apple implement this layer then the arguments for "no software" "not fast enough" kinda vanish. I appreciate memory and gfx will be a little difficult, but not impossible. details, details....

    While I'm dreaming... I'll have transparent clever clustering of apps.

    With a Win32 layer and inherent Beowulf'n I would only buy macs (even @ $10k) rather than never....

    • There were a bunch of macs in the old days that had an x86 chip on a daughter card I believe. The main problem I can see with that today is heat. Macs are compact computers, and they do enough work trying to dissapate the heat from a G4 let alone a Pentium.
    • As someone else mentioned this used to be the way Mac did it. Further Sun still does this. I don't see any reason it couldn't work providing apple started making louder computers with bigger fans.

    • I think a daughterboard would be ideal. You would get direct hardware speed, no worries about compatability, etc etc etc. Map the daughterboard's video to a window, allow cut-n-paste, etc etc etc. This would be a very good thing IMO.

      Actually, I'm surprised it didn't continue on from the pre-OS X days. Anyone know if there's something like this in the works?
    • Apple has better than Beowulf, they have Appleseed [ucla.edu]. All the power of Beowulf but with the ease of Apple; 1 page manual for Appleseed, 200+ pages for Beowulf. As for the Win32 layer, Apple used to have a PC Compatibility card, which was an x86 CPU/RAM/Video board for certain models that allowed you to run Windows on your Mac. I think it's time Apple reintroduced this option.
      • no no no! not what has been done but what could be...

        I meant every app automatically uses any compute nodes available, not just specialised apps.

        The win32 layer is NOT an emulator in a window - I mean a layer like MacOS layer and the UNIX layer. It would be transparent. kinda like wine...

    • I think a PCI card with a celeron or ultra-lowvolt PIII and a way to mount a 'DOS' disk from an image file on the HFS drive should do the trick. This is what they used to do when CPUs were way too slow to emulate well. Either that or a web-appliance that runs a VNC-compatible protocol, an x86 PC in a box with a 'virtual framebuffer' video driver pumping out VNC-compatible screen over ethernet, configurable with a browser. hmm. I've got something like that here, but it's more crude. It works quite well.

  • Don't Hate MS VPC Just Because. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Spencerian ( 465343 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @01:08PM (#5433654) Homepage Journal
    Virtual PC is the #1 emulation software for a reason. In 6 years it practically destroyed its competition because its code was so elegant and more versatile. Switching to anything else Just Because Microsoft owns it now is folly. You can stick to your politics, but you won't get your work done unless you use Windows somewhere else, somehow. On a Mac, your options are, in comparison to VPC, a joke at best.

    Microsoft is many things, but it's Mac Business Unit has shown that it is not stupid. I expect good things from this buyout, in retrospect. I also expect the OSS world to kick it up a notch and improve their offerings if VPC loses its luster.

    The only worry from Microsoft VPC is (1) feature glutting as all MS programs tend to do (2) Microsoft's very slow reaction to release bug fixes. They need to take a lesson from Connectix on keeping the customer happy, or someone may appear with a new product that makes VPC a has-been, and leave MS with an expensive, malfunctioning dud.
    • I expect good things from this buyout, in retrospect.

      Um, are you expecting it or is it in retrospect. Or are you looking back on something that has not happened yet? Hmm...

      ;)
    • In 6 years it practically destroyed its competition because its code was so elegant and more versatile. Switching to anything else Just Because Microsoft owns it now is folly.

      The above can now be said about emulation software, web browser, email client, and office software.

      It's not this alone that's problematic. It's this when looked at as part of the big picture. Microsoft has Apple & its users by the cajones. This acquisition tightens the grip. Apple may be trying to wriggle out, but it's going to keep getting harder and harder to do so.
      • Don't forget....MS has a long history of buying up companies like this, and then taking said company's software off the market. MS rarely leaves these core apps intact. They either let them stagnate, or bury them. MS doesn't buy them because they want to see them grow. Beats having to build something to compete...just buy the rights and staff and let them sit on the shelf.
    • Sorry.

      I 'switched' to OSX from Windows/Linux (though I still use Linux for many, many things) as my main use operating system because I decided I want *nothing* to do with Microsoft as a company any more. Zero. Zilch.

      It's not politics.

      I have seen this company grow from when it was just 3 folks burning BASIC ROM's to what it is now, and I am sick of their shit.

      So, I want nothing more to do with them.

      VirtualPC was a way for me to have nothing more to do with them, safely and comfortably, and still be able to get access to my Windows-specific data for the switch process.

      Now that switch process - or at least, a key element of it - is under the control of the very company that prompted my switching in the first place.

      Well, great.

      Looks like there's a market for PC emulators ... if Microsoft is willing to spend so much on one!!
      • Er, if you were using VPC to switch your Windows data, presumably you were using Windows under it? If so, was it legal? If so, you had things to do with them. If no, well... Come on, if you were using Windows, what does it matter who owns the emulator? If you weren't using Windows: what was the point at all?
        • The copy of Windows I have been using with VPC is the one that came with the last PC I owned, which I subsequently turned into a Linux box.

          I paid for this Windows license, I see nothing wrong with using it under VPC to access files. I don't use this VPC session productively, other than to remove even more worth from it as time goes by, if/when I need to find something I haven't already moved over.

          My point, since you missed it, is that the very tool that I'm using to perform a comfortable switch, done at my own pace rather than at the pace of Microsoft, is now under their control.

          That's the point.

          Incidentally, I also use VPC for Linux sessions, which I find to be extremely useful in my Linux hacking efforts.

          If I can't keep doing that - doubtful, perhaps - then it'll only be because Microsoft deemed the ability to do so to be counter-Microsoft...
    • Hear hear. For those crying for abandoning it, this comment is worth a read, so mod him up (where are mod points when I'd actually use them?).

      I'm getting tired of people trashing Microsoft to trash Microsoft, but equally tired of people promoting Open Source on the basis that it's Open Source. Bochs is no replacement for VPC, and without a few hundred thousand dollars to dedicate towards some full-time hard-core emulation staff, it won't be for a long long time. Sure, it works, if you can call it that, but that's about all it does.

      Virtual PC is the only solution, period, if you want to do quality x86 emulation on the MacOS, and after using it on Windows XP, I can't much imagine using anything else. If Microsoft makes it better, then I'll buy the next version. If they make it worse, then I'll keep VPC 5.

      The way I see it, the worst thing they could do (unless they intentionally try to run it into the ground) is bundle it with a copy of Windows XP, and change the price to reflect the added 'value'. Oddly, not a single person has mentioned this in the comments that I've seen.

      Well, or they could cancel the product line and integrate it into Windows to allow users to run a 'Classic' version of their os on Longhorn, which will be fundimentally incompatible with previous versions of windows at the filesystem level, in a virtual machine in order to allow those programs to continue on with the older APIs and filesystems that were implemented before.

      Hmm, I wonder if Apple's applied for a patent on 'running old OS paradigms in virtual machines on new OS paradigms' or whatever. Boy, wouldn't that be cool.

      --Dan
  • ...will it be to slow when compiled with the optimized gcc that is built for the 64bit PPC970 chip that Apple will be shipping later this year?
    2003 is destined to be one of the most interesting years in the history of computing.
    • Interesting years in computing simply aren't interesting any more!
    • will it be to slow when compiled with the optimized gcc that is built for the 64bit PPC970 chip that Apple will be shipping later this year?

      Yes. And you don't know they're shipping the 970 this year.

    • Yes, it will (Score:2, Interesting)

      by FredFnord ( 635797 )
      GCC's processor optimization is so-so for x86 and stinks for PPC. This will not change anytime soon.

      The x86 has been picked over until the cows come home, and it's still not as good as some of the competing stuff. Why? Because a lot of very important ways to do optimization are, you guessed it, patented. You can license these and include them in your proprietary compiler, but if you're altering gcc and actually releasing the alterations back to the community, as Apple is, you can't use them at all.

      This is why MrC, Apple's ancient optimizing PPC C compiler, still (as of last year, anyway, and I doubt anything has changed) produces code that iss on average between 15 and 30 percent faster than gcc's. I saw some bottlenecks entirely removed by MrC, where the code went up to 3 times as fast.

      So yes, it will still be slow when compiled with the optimized gcc that is built for the blah blah blah. If you want to speed up the program, spend some time optimizing IT.

      -fred

  • RED-BOCHS (Score:3, Informative)

    by oscast ( 653817 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @01:32PM (#5433858) Homepage
    The following article [oscast.com] from oscast [oscast.com] seeks out alternatives to the now-tainted Virtual PC software and finds a worthy alternative in OpenOSX's WinTel software, which utilizes software from the open source Bochs project. I've been hypothesizing the posability that Apple might integrate something like this into OS X, but replace Window's UI with that of the Mac OS. Now consider this as a posability: IBM and Apple working together to integrate x86 32-bit instructions on the PPC 970 so that PPC Linux and OS X could emulate Win32 without the performace hit. I mean, if you were IBM, wouldn't you want to take away all of Intel's market share, and if you were Apple wouldn;t you want to do the same for Microsoft. Such a strategy would definately cause people to take a second look at switching... especially considering Microsoft's intentions with Paludium and all. Kindof gives a whole new definition to the term RedBochs Something to thik about...

  • Eric Traut (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Feral Bueller ( 615138 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @01:38PM (#5433910) Homepage
    I'm much more interested in what's going on with Eric Traut, Connectix's CTO.

    Before Connectix, he worked at Apple as a Senior Software Engineer.

    Per his resume, his work at Apple included " Researched, designed, and implemented second-generation 680x0 emulator for PowerPC-based Macintoshes. New emulator design involved "dynamic recompilation," or on-the-fly code translation, from 680x0 to PowerPC instruction sets. Implementation required extensive knowledge of both 680x0 and PowerPC architectures and optimizing compiler techniques. Several patents pending in the area of emulation."

    I'm very interested in seeing whether he stays at Connectix or goes somewhere else. Like back to Apple.

    Here's his resume. [traut.com] Connectix Executive bios are here. [connectix.com]

  • Why not just rewrite as much software as possible to be platform independent, and get rid of the emulator altogether? And if the software you need is from MS, find a competitor who will confront them in the marketplace.
  • Whatever happened to those lovely cards one could install in their Mac that had an Intel processor and software to run a PC OS from the card with the ability to swap the monitor back and forth?

    With PC components being so cheap, why aren't there any products like this? I'd rather buy a product like that than pay for MS VPC.
    • The problem is that most Macs sold today do not have a PCI Slot...
      The right idea would be a small box with an Intel compatible CPU (transmeta? AMD? Not Intel, please), shraing verything with the Mac through a Firewire connectio... Would that be fast enough?
      If it can be done in for about 300$, it could be a big hit...
      • Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't FireWire kind of slow compared to PCI?
        • I have noooo idea...
          But that's not the important quesstion. The important question is if Firewire is fast enough...
          It is certainly fast enough for external hard drives... How much info passes from a CPU to a BUS? How fast is that?
          I don't know. I'm just saying that most Mac users can't use a PCI card...

      • Re:Give me a Crusoe on a PCI card (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        >do not have a PCI Slot
        Umm... check the Apple page, and you will see that Tower Macs do in fact have PCI slots. PowerBooks and iMacs don't.

  • Poor Article (Score:4, Informative)

    by absurdhero ( 614828 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @03:01PM (#5434709) Homepage
    This article was not very well written and just tries to ride the hype of the startling VPC news. The guy didn't do much technical research and envisions Windows software running seemlessly on OS X just like Classic apps. The author apparently didn't understand that Bochs is an x86 emulator and cannot run along side OS X without huge modifications to its code and Apple's. Even worse, he called bochs a Windows emulator. Bochs has nothing to do with windows or emulating it. It emulates a simple Intel based computer independant of the operating system. It is very hard to get WIndows running on it. Especially on the Mac. There are 5 page tutorials on getting it working. I really doubt Apple could get any use out of Bochs. It simply isn't designed for the use that everyone wants out of it. It is primarily for OS debugging and other developement uses. It is NOT a replacement for a PC emulator geared towards home users wanting to run windows.
  • Don't bother.

    It's slow, it's buggy, it has a HORRID HORRID HORRID interface. Absolutely HORRID!

    VPC beat out many commercial products. RealPC, SoftWindows, Blue Label, and various DOS cards from Apple and OrangePC. When I say beat out I don't mean out-sell, I mean beat them out of the market with a boot up their ass!

    Comparing VPC to Bochs is LAUGHABLE!

    If Apple wants to make a VPC-like product they would be better off starting from scratch than trying to hold Bochs above water. Seriously.

    • Re:For anybody wanting to try Bochs, here's a tip: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Bochs is horrendously slow, but it is not buggy. However, its goal is to provide a platform for hardware simulation, and performance is not the goal. It does not use Altivec. It uses 8-bit VGA with no acceleration. It does not use a JIT. It is designed to be cross-platform, so does not use platform-specific implementations (except maybe for the x86).

      On a TiBook/400, it is barely useable under DOS, and terrible under Win95. In addition, no effort has been made to accelerate it on the G3 or G4, except maybe with WinTel, who seem to have provided proprietary Altivec enhancements in their distribution.

      To speed it up, I believe you would need
      - XVGA implementation so you can use more elaborated graphics primitives, maybe with Altivec enhancement.
      - Use Altivec for CPU instructions decoding.
      - Create native PPC versions of Windows drivers.
      - Use a JIT. However, this may be detrimental to the first goal of correct hardware simulation.
      - Desynchronize the main CPU loop from actual CPU consumption. The same comment as above may apply, though.

      Of these enhancements, the first is currently being throught about. The second might be possible if OpenOSX released its sources or Apple put a proficient resource on the problem. The impact would already be huge. The others are more problematic.

      Finally note that VPC is a commercial product with a lot of history. Connectix owns a number of patents on techniques they have developped to spped-up the simulation and looking from the outside since I do not use it, I feel that the product is worth its price. I think that many people do not appreciate the effort put into that kind of product.

      Bochs is Freeware. Following the mailing lists show that the emphasis is not on performance but on correctness. Furthermore, the OSX community is only a tiny part of the people working on Bochs.
  • Well, as we all know, besides being in the business of monopolies and competition crushing, Microsoft's main source of income comes from software. Not just any software, but their Operating System. Now, Mac OS is free of such requirements. No MS OS needed there. So, Microsoft is loosing money (in their eyes) for every Mac sold. Now, what if there was a solution that allowed you to run Windows, like you do at work (for those of you stuck with it there), on your Mac at home, with the same kind of speed that you have at work? Well, that means more copies of Windows sold! Look at that, would you like a shiny copy of Windows that runs real fast on that Mac you just bought? Its in MS' best interest to make VPC as fast, efficient and compatible as they can. The better it is, the more copies of it will sell, and the more copies of Windows, and the more copies of MS Office for that Windows, will sell.

    However, on the down side, chances are, if they make it good enough, they will kill Office for X altogether...why have Office X, just buy Office for Windows and that nice copy of Virtual PC and Windows. Its more money for them that way. But if we are fortunate, Sun and Apple will pick up that with Appleworks and Sun's office suite (which I recall they said they would put on X once MS was gone from the picture)

  • I use Virtual PC when I need to run Windows programs, such as music jukebox Winamp, that have Mac versions but are markedly superior on PC platforms.

    WTF?

    He spends hundreds of dollars on PC emulation software because he "needs" to run Winamp?!?

  • Curious about Windows emulation hardware? (Score:3, Informative)

    by FredFnord ( 635797 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @11:55PM (#5446696)
    Okay, this is for all of you dozens of people who admired the Windows emulation hardware cards, and wonder where they went.

    First off, a general idea of what these were. Basically, in the most recent incarnations, you had a PCI card. On this PCI card you had:
    An Intel-compatible CPU of some sort, usually socketed
    Memory, usually on removable DIMMs
    A graphics processor with its own RAM
    A soundblaster 16 chip
    A whole bus architecture, and all the support chips

    Basically, an entire motherboard, except for the PCI slots, on a PCI card. The only thing the card used the Mac for was
    The keyboard and mouse
    Sometimes other USB devices (on the last generation of cards)
    Mass storage devices

    The back of one of these cards was educational, because right up until the end a lot of them had a giant dongol that you hooked to the back of the card. One end of the dongol was this thing with about six zillion pins. On the other end was a set of connectors, thus:

    A video-out port to go to a monitor
    A video-in port, to plug your Mac video into if you wanted to share one monitor
    A printer port
    A joystick port

    In addition, there was usually an internal connector that connected the audio out from the card to the internal audio in port for the CD player.

    So basically what you had was an entire special-purpose Intel motherboard, complete with most of what you would find on a basic motherboard, in a form factor 1/4 the size of an ATX.

    And the software was bloody expensive and very difficult to write, requiring a very close interfacing between the computer and the card. It had sync issues, it had DMA issues, it had all sorts of issues.

    And you need to offer your solution at less than the price of a comparable PC system.

    So basically, you need to provide:

    1/4-size full-featured Intel motherboard-on-a-stick
    memory
    CPU
    Highly-engine ered, high-maintenance software

    For the same price that Dell provides:

    generic Intel motherboard
    memory
    CPU
    hard drive
    CD-ROM drive (or whatever)

    So basically, if you want a Mac that can run both Mac and PC software at full speeds, here's what you do:

    Buy a Mac.
    Buy a PC.
    Buy a KVM switch and hook them both to the same monitor and keyboard.
    Set up file sharing correctly.

    And yes, I'm speaking as someone who has used two different and perfectly functional PC Compatibility cards, one an Apple-brand and one by Orange Micro. They were great, just as good as any PC I've ever used... and 50% more expensive.

    -fred

  • Dont get it (Score:2, Funny)

    by 54nd3r ( 655620 )
    I don't get it. Are you trying to avoid using Microsoft software to use Microsoft software?

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