Originally posted by: Zelmo3
Hmm, based on winehq's statement that "Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X and Unix," I would have said try compiling wine, seeing that OS-X is a Unix-type system. Then I found
this page that indicates that even if it is possible, it's more trouble than it's worth.
No.
Wine is simply for a API.. it's a Application programming interface.
Win32, or in it's newer term 'Windows API' is a set of libraries files, programs, driver supoprt and Operating system.. er.. systems that is designed to support running windows programs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_API
This is a standardized set of software and code, that only forms PART of Windows, that is provided for application drivers programming in Windows.
That's all.
Someday the Windows API will even be obsolete by Microsoft's standards. The latest plan was to replace it with .NET managed code systems and Avalon display stuff in Longhorn. This would of formed the next generation Application Programming Interface that would of replaced all this DirectX, Win32, and other stuff that started with Windows 95, then Windows 98, then was ported from Windows 9x to run on NT and formed the Windows 2000 operating system.
However that didn't pan out to well for microsoft and Windows API is still alive and well in Vista.
What the problem is is something much lower then a API. It's computer hardware problem.
POWER/PowerPC is the architecture designed by IBM as a improvement over the regular x86 PC line of computers. It's a RISC architecture and superior in most respects on a technical level. It's a little-enden archatecture, which means that it counts 1's and 0's differently then x86 (although it can optionally use large enden, but that's only realy for embedded stuff nowadays, everything is little-enden).
x86 in comparision is a CISC architecture. It's designed after a very old fasioned way they used to use when designing computer CPUs. It's very old in computer terms. Nowadays Intel and AMD proccessors are mostly 'RISC' internally but have large amounts of circuitry devouted to emulating x86, which in the proper term is called the x86 ISA. (and conversely the powerpc arch supports the PowerPC ISA).
When you write a program for a computer you generally write it in C or C++ or other language of your choice. Then you use a compiler like GCC (which is what Linux and OS X uses) to turn that code into 'machine code'. This machine code is then what actually gets run on a computer's hardware. The machine code is 1's and 0's.
Thats why we generally call compiled program files 'executable binaries'. They are binary files of 1's and 0's that are made up of machine code that contains cpu instructions and such.
Now x86 and PowerPC machine code is mutually incompatable. PowerPC can't run x86 machine code and x86 can't run PowerPC machine code. Wine cannot do this. Wine does not do anything to make machine code compatable with alien hardware. It is NOT a machine emulator.
In order to make a Windows game run on OS X using just Wine you would have to first compile Wine for OS X.
Then you would have to obtain the source code for that game.
Then you would have to figure out how to compile it so that it works with Wine + OS X.
Things like virtual PC on the other hand translates x86 machine code to run on PowerPC... which is why it's so slow in comparision to natively compiled programs.
That's what you'd need. You would need a computer program that emulates x86 hardware on a PowerPC machine.
Something like that is
http://bochs.sourceforge.net/ bochs x86 emulator.
It emulates a entire x86 computer. It emulates the harddrive, it emulates the motherboard, cpu, bios, video bios, memory. It emulates everything about a x86 computer.
It runs perfectly well on PowerPC. It runs on Linux(pretty much everything), Windows (x86), several BSD operating sytems(pretty much everything), and OS X (PPC).
The only real downside is that it would take a couple hours to boot up Windows 2000 on it and all your programs would run slow and mean. However it's great for running older games, especially dos.
A nice dos to try out on it is FreeDOS
www.freedos.org
It'll run fairly good. On my older laptop with a 2.0ghz pentium 4 mobile it ran about the same speed as a maybe a 100mhz-200mhz cpu. Some games I'd have to slow it down even because the clock was to fast.
I even ran a stripped down version of Windows 9x on it. (basicly just Explorer cut down to minimum to run on MS-DOS.) You could probably run one of those crazy stripped down 'win98 lite' versions on it.
Still though any game new enough to need DirectX 8 or 9 will run like utter crap on it. On a 1.25ghz PowerPC computer I'd expect Bochs to run about the same speed as a 60-120ghz PC. Just a guess, I never measured it personally.
watch out for scammers though. There are a lot of sideways companies selling borked up versions this or that that you should watch out for. Bochs is lGPL'd Free software, FreeDOS is GPL'd Free software and 100% compatable with MS-DOS, and Windows 98 or Windows 95 binaries should only be used if you have a license for those operating systems.
