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]

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 (http://www.holwegner.com/software/)