Cherry OS Claims Mac OS X Capability For x86 1090
jediboytj writes "According to the MacWorld Article, Cherry OS, does what Virtual PC does for Macs, only the opposite. PC Users are now able to run Mac OSX at G4 Speeds (Company claims 80% of the speed of your PC). It also includes full hardware support: hard drive, CPU, RAM, FireWire, USB, PCI, PCMCIA bus, Ethernet networking and modem. The software is being distributed through electronic download at $49.99 USD..." Note: it does not come with a copy of any Apple OS. Anyone in Windowsland tried it to provide a thumbs up (or down)?
Re:Finally... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Oh Boy! (Score:5, Informative)
I know you were just being a smartass, a time-honored tradition around here, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to be informative.
MirrorDot is Useful (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.mirrordot.org [mirrordot.org]
Enough already.
Re:Finally... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Looks... non-existent (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Looks... non-existent (Score:5, Informative)
Its got that feeling of an overnight company. The whois record was only registered in july.
It wouldnt supprise me if its some company that took pearPC and is trying to sell it.
Re:Looks... non-existent (Score:1, Informative)
I have no idea (Score:4, Informative)
From the CherryOS Site: (Score:5, Informative)
NEWS RELEASE FOR IMMEADIATE RELEASE Contact: Jim Kartes, 866-661-5699 jim@vx30.com Media contact same.
Maui, HI (DATE) MXS today announce the immediate availability of Cherry OS software . Cherry OS is a software translator that allows you to install Apple's Operating System on x86 computer architecture. To put it simply you can now run Apple's award winning Panther OS on your PC! This breakthrough in OS development now gives home users, software developers and web designer's ultimate flexibility in both the operating system and hardware platform you use for your personal computer or testing environment.
Cherry OS runs Panther as a virtual machine on your Windows PC. This virtual machine has full network capabilities including the ability to share folders and access the web. The virtual machine also has complete access to the computer's hardware resources including, Hard Drive, CPU, RAM, Firewire, USB, PCI, PCMIA BUS and RJ45/Ethernet and Modem.
Arben Kryeziu, Cherry OS inventor and a software developer, got tired of carrying both a Mac and a PC around with him, so he invented Cherry OS. "Think about it," says Arben. "Now about 600 million PC users can have the MAC advantage. One computer to use all software and if PC users would use MAC software to get email, perhaps they would avoid viruses, Trojans and spy-ware." He went on to say that , "You can build and test applications for a Mac on your development PC, test web site design for Mac web browsers without having to buy the hardware, run OS X, the world's best Operating System, on a less expensive hardware platform and use your favorite Mac apps on a PC."
Pricing and availability
Cherry OS is now available only on line at www.cherryos.com as a download, for $49.95. (Mac software not included)
About MXS
MXS is a software development company specializing in video streaming software. Playerless-streaming.org ranked our vx30 encoder as the best in the world.
The products of Maui X-Stream can be viewed on www.vx30.com
Re:MirrorDot is Useful (Score:2, Informative)
Try this instead: (Score:4, Informative)
Re:But why? (Score:5, Informative)
There are lots of other reasons you could contrive, what if you had Mac friends that visit a lot but constantly lament being unable to use your PC? It fundamentally boils down to you wanting _both_, but you need more performance on the PC side, which I really think is more common of a case, just on games alone.
Re:But why? (Score:5, Informative)
Absolutely: Safari, Camino, and ie/Mac. Web developers can see what their site will look like and how it will function on a Mac without needing to get more hardware.
I used to run Win2k on VMWare on Linux so I could see how my sites would look on a PC.
Re:Finally... (Score:5, Informative)
According to the license you cant run the OS on an emulator because its not "Apple hardware".
Re:Try this instead: (Score:5, Informative)
PearPC does run Mac OS X, but at an absolute snails pace (Yes, I've tried it - Three hours to install, approx 1-2 minutes to open a finder-window).
If CherryOS indeed runs it at a somewhat decent G4-ish speed I'd almost consider 50 bucks to be worth it.
Screenshots on [H]ard[F]orum (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Try this instead: (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe 3MHz. Ish.
Re:MirrorDot is Useful (Score:1, Informative)
An appeal to /. editors and submitters (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.cherryos.com.nyud.net:8090/ [nyud.net]
Use Coral CDN [nyu.edu]! It works and it's available, no excuses except laziness.
Manual avaliable online (Score:5, Informative)
Manual avaliable here:
http://www.vx30.com/documents/CherryOS.pdf
or as a
http://www.vx30.com/documents/CherryOS.doc
Re:I'd like to see a comparison (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I'd like to see a comparison (Score:4, Informative)
PearPC is free/FREE, though, and I only use it for Safari compatibility testing, so its speed isn't a major issue for me.
--
I think you misspelled Engelbart... (Score:3, Informative)
CherryOS's speed claims, at least, are fraudulent (Score:2, Informative)
It *might* be possible to write a compiler that can build x86 binaries with PPC binaries as input. It would be hard and the performance would probably still suck, but this is the route that will give the best performance. There has to be a lot of register usage analysis that needs to be done to get something like this even remotely usable, and you are going to want to do this statically.
If someone ran out and made a legitimate system like this, several things would be true:
1) These people would probably be from a compiler company, because the work that needs to be done to do this efficiently is *hard* and requires a lot of techniques that compilers use.
2) If this is a commercial project (i.e. people are actually serious about making money and not getting hit by lawsuits), they would have gotten an OK from Apple and Apple would have made noise promoting this. Why? The only practical reason to build a modern Mac emulator is to run Mac OS X, which, on non-Apple hardware, is a violation of Apple's EULA.
3) The ROM problem is still present -- you can't make a Mac emulator legally without the Mac ROMs, which Apple keeps copyrighted. -- see #2.
Re:So, you're asking (Score:4, Informative)
Scam alert (Score:5, Informative)
Desctop & Task Manager
and under "What can CherryOS do?":
Skin enadled GUI
But beyond the typos, their "Client Showcase" features a testimonial from "Secnet Q&A Services" which Google doesn't have any information on (hmm, a Q&A company without a web presence?).
My guess either an out-and-out scam, or a an attempt to pawn off a modified copy of PearPC in an attempt to generate some $ and scram. Ballsy.
Re:CherryOS's speed claims, at least, are fraudule (Score:5, Informative)
Re:one has to question the 80% speed claim (Score:5, Informative)
I won't, because the x86 line has lots of general purpose registers now. They just pretend to be whatever special purpose ones the programs need (if any). We've come a long way since the 386.
Re:CherryOS's speed claims, at least, are fraudule (Score:5, Informative)
Even the classic Mac OS didn't need the ROMs anymore in its last incarnation.
The less-than-modern Macs had driver support for booting in its ROM, and loaded the Toolbox from a file in the system folder (it's named "Mac OS ROM", though). Modern Macs use OpenFirmware [openfirmware.com], which is, as the name says, open. Moreover, it's easily emulated, allowing for running OS X on arbitrary PPC machines (with MOL [maconlinux.org]). Yes, that means e.g. Genesis or AmigaOne boards. Or anything with a PPC, really.
Re:Looks... non-existent (Score:3, Informative)
Getting from 4.4BSD-Lite2 to Darwin seems to have had contributions [tribug.org] from both FreeBSD and NetBSD.
PearPC is not that slow (Score:4, Informative)
It's an AthlonXP 3000 (oced to 2400MHz or thereabout) box with 1GB RAM. I've assigned 512MB for PearPC.
The overall score is indeed abysmal 2.89. For comparison, my PB 12" (867MHz) gets something in the range of 80, I think.
But if I look at the score more closely, I notice that major drag comes from vecLib FFT test (scored 0.15!) and all kinds of graphics test (OpenGL test being the worst).
For other things, it scores about 30 to 60 scores range. Disk test is pretty impressive. I only have a regular ATA drive on my PC. Got the score better than my PB disk.
These results are quite understandable considering what PearPC is doing. I would say for some tasks, this might even be usable.
Very impressive, I must say.
Use the Coral Link if you can (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Thievery (Score:1, Informative)
No you're not. You're copying it. Copying is different from taking. Words matter. I understand that you'd like to apply the connotation of "steal" and "take," to copyright infringement, because "infringement" doesn't sound as bad. But tough shit. Use the right words.
Re:Thievery (Score:2, Informative)
Re:CherryOS's speed claims, at least, are fraudule (Score:4, Informative)
Emulators aren't all they're cracked up to be... (Score:4, Informative)
Honestly, anything that requires heavy calculations is either going to break the emulator or run abysmally slow. Although email and web browsing can be tollerable (I often proof webpages using VirtualPC to get a view from the other side of the pond), I can't see any of the iLife apps being usable under CherryOS. They typically tax my 800MHz iMac. I can't imagine how slowly they would run under emulation...
Let me educate you... (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe you should go and get some experience or at least some knowledge before you start talking about something you know nothing about.
Altivec from its beginning introduced 162 vector instructions that have not changed from the initial G4 to the current G5. On the other hand, Intel's MMX/SSE/SSE2 instructions have evolved over time - roughly 57 in MMX, 78? in SSE and 144 in SSE2. Altivec has been a well-designed and versatile SIMD engine from its beginning while Intel has sort of hacked together their SIMD engine as they've evolved their processors. Intel's implementation is very troublesome for a programmer because he has to do many different things depending on what is available (MMX/SSE/SSE2). These instructions don't map 1:1 for the most part with Altivec. And while SSE2 is much better than SSE, it was only introduced with the Pentium 4.
Also, Altivec has 32 128-bit registers to only 8 128-bit registers for SSE/SSE2. I don't care what anyone says, trying to emulate 32 registers (when all you have is 8) in an SIMD engine is going to be a lot slower.
You say that only a small percentage of time will be spent using Altivec, but that's just not true. Apple has optimized a large part of Mac OS X to use Altivec, especially in Quartz (the windowing and compositing engine). This would result in a major slowdown for any emulator in pretty much every application (except for stuff like background daemons). You'd probably do better just to emulate a G3 so as to not run any Altivec code.
Re:I think it's a scam ... agreed (Score:5, Informative)
Both Connectix and Insignia (the two main companies that produced Windows emulation for the Mac) were actually just venture capital firms. This is why Connectix, at the height of every product launched, would just sell it off as an asset.
Connectix Quickcam = Logitech Quickcam
Connectix Virtual Game Station = Sony Buyout
Connectix Virtual PC ( at an undeniable breakthrough point) = Microsodt VPC
Insignia was the same:
Softwindows
Insignia is supposedly shopping this around.
I have found that these two companies were essentially started up by venture capital and paid off their investors, dumped their employees, and the owners got filthy rich.
Now, as for this software. I find it NEXT to impossible that the software is running a G4 at 80% speed of the CPU. If you were to translate this properly - Apple's CPUs are about 1.2X as fast as the equivalent P4 and P3 (G3 & G4 respectively) - so essentially the claim is saying it will run a 100% equivalent Mhz / speed ratio.
This means if I had a 3Ghz Pentium 4 with 1 Gig RAM - I would have the equivalent of a 2.4Ghz G4!! There's just NO way!
Re:one has to question the 80% speed claim (Score:3, Informative)
Re:PearPC is not that slow (Score:3, Informative)
Probably because the PowerBook (and most laptops) only have 4200 RPM drives in their default configurations.
Re:Looks... non-existent (Score:1, Informative)
Re:CherryOS's speed claims, at least, are fraudule (Score:5, Informative)
Re:So, you're asking (Score:1, Informative)
http://toastytech.com/guis/rhap.html [toastytech.com]
And it died ca. 1997:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/1998/11/05/who_kille
Re:one has to question the 80% speed claim (Score:3, Informative)
add r3, r3, r4
ori r5, r3, r5
xor r3, r3, r3
(which puts r3+r4|r5 in r5, and 0 in r3; again, this is just an example, and kinda silly). here, r3 is used six times. For the first instruction, it is read in one context, and then written in another (writing always creates a new context). The ori then uses the r3 in the second context, and the xor uses it in the second context and makes a third. So, using tN as temporary (or rename) register N, this is the same as
add t0, r3, r4
ori r5, t0, r5
xor t1, t0, t0
The same could be done for the other registers, of course. The advantage of this is that, because the registers are used consecutively less often, scheduling is easier.
If you're interested in more details, check out (google) Tomasulo's algorithm.
Summary: Renaming is cool. Everyone does it. But it doesn't help you emulate more registers, particularly.
Re:Possibly a good idea... (Score:3, Informative)
This point has been debated over and over, so I'll mention the $799 eMacs (educ discount) and $949 ibooks (also discount) and $1199 iMacs and move on.
But now that Mac OS X is available on the PC (and is fast), perhaps I can use a fast, cheap PC to run OS X.
One solution, PearPC, is unbearably slow for more than checking website compatibility in OS X. The other, Cheerios (yes I know), may or may not exist and may or may not work, and may or may not just be a $50 version of PearPC.
Macs only have a chance vs. PCs because they have very efficient architecture. Apple doesn't have nearly enough money to compete with Intel or AMD, so they use a more efficient architecture.
Why would Apple compete with AMD or Intel? Apple makes computers, and IBM makes the G5s, and Motorola makes the G4. Intel and AMD do not sell computers.
Stop talking about of your ass.
Re:Good news.. (Score:3, Informative)
There's plenty of other frameworks that are heavily tied to AltiVec now. While it would be possible to gut them and get them working fine with SSE2 it would be a huge undertaking. It's taken years to get the good AltiVec support the exists right now, it would take several more to get an x86 port up to snuff.
Re:CherryOS's speed claims, at least, are fraudule (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, register renaming help but as the compiler don't see those hidden register, it may have to spill some value into the cache to free a register because it needs one and here the register renaming can't help you..
I think that the x86-64 good performance is partly because of this: going from 8 GPR to 16 is a big win, especially on x86 *ahem* less than orthogonal architecture).
The difference between 16 and 32 GPRs is much less interesting..
PearPC HD files (Score:4, Informative)
Also, no one has made a foolproof HD creator that works 100% so obviously CherryOS couldn't steal that. That's why their profile setup only allows 3GB or 6GB HDs. That's what is available for PearPC.
EULAs (Score:4, Informative)
Maybe it hasn't been tried for Apple software, but at least one EULA was declared enforceable [slashdot.org] in an U.S. court. Sad, isn't it?
Re:So, you're asking (Score:3, Informative)
Rhapsody wasn't the name for the x86 port, it was the name for the next generation Mach + NeXT Step based MacOS, which is what became OSX.
It doesn't suprise me that they had x86 builds early on, but I could hardly say they "Made an x86 OS"
Re:CherryOS's speed claims, at least, are fraudule (Score:2, Informative)
And as a side note, the G3/G4/G5 PPCs probably have those as well, since they're not a x86 specific thing. I know that the 604 does, and it's a generation 2 PPC.
Re:I'd like to see a comparison (Score:2, Informative)
CherryOS = PearPC? [emaculation.com]
Always some doubt over this claim. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Finally... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:A Report From Maui (Score:5, Informative)
Digging Deeper: Jim Kartes (Score:2, Informative)
Now that the seemingly Pacific sized wave of traffic has rolled over Hawaii based cherryos.com, some more information can be gleamed from it's now visible pages. Their press release [cherryos.com] contact is stated as Jim Kartes.
Jim also happens to be the admin and tech contact for vx30.com. A quick Googling of his name [google.com] brings up several links, including the website for MauiGiclee, a Maui based printing company [mauigiclee.com] which lists one Jim Kartes as it's president. How many Jim Kartes can their be in Hawaii? 411.com lists only 1 [411.com]. Finding info online is fun.
Further Googling and whois searches show that Jim has a hand in many things Maui.
Lets list a few of em:
http://www.mauionline.com/ [mauionline.com] (Paradise Television Network Inc)
http://www.vx30.com/ [vx30.com] (Video Steaming Tech)
http://mauigiclee.com/ [mauigiclee.com] (Print Production)
http://cherryos.com/ [cherryos.com] (Emulation Software)
I'm sure the list goes on. Jim's a busy man, you see.
Predictably, all these websites sport the same type of Java Applet video found on cherryos.com. Seems like VX30 (aka MXS Inc.) has been busy supplying Java based video steaming tech to a lot of Jim's other businesses.
At any rate, these businesses (excluding, by nature of this thread, the cherry in question) seem to have been operating for some time, the oldest site being registered in 1996. They also seem quite legitimate in their desire to provide services and products, bothering to list themselves with superpages, register 1-800 numbers, etc. These are not signs of scam artists looking to make a quick get-away, so that possibility can be put to rest.
The following options still remain:
1. CerryOs is a ripoff of PearPC (though the company has reportedly denied these accusations by phone)
2. The product is real and unique, though the performance promises are exagerated.
3. This is legit and we should all stop wasting time with such nonsense : )
I hope it's the latter.
Re:Let me educate you... (Score:3, Informative)
Interview with CherryOS creator (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not likely (Score:3, Informative)
That's potentially a whole lot of rewriting (and potentially creating a need to mantain yet another code branch for various portions of the OS) in order to get an OS that is still going to only work on a very small portion of the PC hardware out there. And I'm not talking "you won't be able to burn DVDs" not working, I'm talking "the OS won't run, period, because Core Image doesn't support your graphics card."
Which means that they will have a target market consisting of people like you who are willing to buy the one and only one OS X Approved PC. Of course, to make that available as something other than a homebuild, Apple will have to make it themselves. Which will probably make it end up costing not much less than any other Apple computer because it will end up being a solid magnesium pyramid with no visible apertures or seams or something like that because that's what Apple does.
At which point Apple has gone through a ridiculous wad of cash in order to make your Mac work less smoothly than other Macs. But at least it cost you $100 less.
Methinks Apple would be much wiser to spend that money on continuing to improve the value of their PPC hardware. Maybe that way they can save you $150 on a better computer, instead.
Re:Why Apple won't do that? (Score:1, Informative)
Look every week - and for a whole week look twice a day - you'll find good deals like $529 shipped!
RE: PearPC, repackaged? (Score:4, Informative)
Their screenshots I saw this morning on their web site were only depicting OS X's main desktop and finder screens. Never once did they show it running a single app! (That was the deal with PearPC too, wasn't it? At first, people could run OS X itself, view the finder, and the prefs panes - but that was about all it could do without crashing.)
Now, it looks like they're claiming people are "trying to hack the site" and so on, and they only have some video movie available to download/watch. I was getting horribly slow connections to them, but the first 50% or so of the video I watched only showed the program being installed on an XP box. (Big whoop! It has an installer program that can actually copy files over to the PC.)
Re:So, you're asking (Score:5, Informative)
Rhapsody was the name of the OS [strategy] developed under the leadership of Gil Amelio, it was heavily based on OpenStep (moreso than OS X), hence it's cross platform capabilities. Apple also had a version of the Rhapsody frameworks that ran in NT, which they inherited from NeXT. At that stage, the name for Cocoa was YellowBox, and the Classic environment was called BlueBox IIRC. There was no equivalent to the Carbon frameworks in those early days, which was the subject of much debate.
Steve Jobs became Interim CEO after Amelio's departure in 1997 and killed the cross platform versions of Rhapsody along with the Mac 'clone' industry. About a year later Apple announced the name change from Rhapsody to Mac OS X. They released Mac OS X Server in 1999, followed a year later by the almost unrecognisable OS X Public Beta.
Check out these screenshots, which (in order from top to bottom) show the gradual progression from NeXTstep's multi-column Browser to Mac OS X 10.3's Finder*.
NeXTstep [pair.com]
Rhapsody [z80.org]
Mac OS X server 1.x [stepwise.com]
Panther [arstechnica.com]
*yes, I skipped the aqua Finder.
Screenshots (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~achille/screenshots/1.J
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~achille/screenshots/2.J
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~achille/screenshots/3.J
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~achille/screenshots/4.J
Re:So, you're asking (Score:3, Informative)
Re:FULL hardware support? I think not... (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, that's not what you said. You said:
"Mac OS X uses Quartz Extreme to render all the windows in 3d with shadows and fancy coloring. No graphics card = horrid windowing performance."
Implying that without Quartz Extreme windowing performance would be unbearable, that shadows wouldn't work, and that the colours would somehow be affected. All bullshit.
This is an emulator we're talking about, even if it doesn't support Quartz Extreme it can still achieve high performance.
Mac on Linux doesn't support Quartz Extreme yet performs admirably. Though PearPC's graphics speed is not very impressive, it's hardly the limiting factor there either.
I'd contend that the lack of/support for QE has approximately nothing whatsoever to do with performance in an emulator (as anyone whose used a PPC emulator/VM can attest), and that your previous post appeared to say that without QE support the emulator would not be able to render shadows or draw colours correctly. This, as you are obviously aware, is blatantly false.
Which is why I called you a troll.
Had you made the assertions you made in this post, I would have supported some of what you say, but I think without some kind of native graphics card translator, QE would be worthless anyway, and in fact would almost certainly be slower.
As you may already be aware, native graphics card support is not just a matter of 1:1 mapping between the PC and Mac graphics card, because of fundamental architectural differences between x86 and PPC. There would need to be some interception and modification of QE's graphics instructions into the correct form for the PC graphics chipset, which could easily negate any speed benefit.
In short, you're correct about it being slower, but the Chicken Little-esque, sky-is-falling way you went about stating it in your previous post made it sound like the emulator would be useless simply because it didn't support QE, which is far from truthful.
Re:Where's the CherryOS site gone??? (Score:1, Informative)