Darwine, Run Windows apps without Windows. The Popular app W...

[MacBytes]

Category: 3rd Party Software
Link: Darwine, Run Windows apps without Windows. The Popular app WINE is being ported to Mac OS X (http://www.macbytes.com/link.php?sid=20040127203846)

Posted on MacBytes.com (http://www.macbytes.com)

Approved by arn

[Nermal]

As far as I know, the current version of Darwine requires the Windows executables to be compiled for PowerPC. So it can't run any "standard" Windows apps yet. Of course, they're working on getting i386-compiled executables to run.

Note: It's been a while since I've looked, it might be possible to run i386 executables now.

Edit: It says this in the FAQ, so what I said above is still correct.

Is the Darwin/Mac OS X release of Wine currently able to run Windows executable (.exe)?

No. We are today working on integrating an x86 emulator in wine in order to run Win32 exe on a PowerPC Box. But on Darwin-x86 Win32 exe should run within wine.

[Molten Thinker]

Why!? I think we've got most of our apps on the Mac! We should be proud of out platform! Even though such a development sounds cool. :).

[TwitchOSX]

Well.. I just thought of something before I go on with my rantings. Will this run any faster than using Virtual PC? If not, I could care less about it.

If it DOES run faster it will be awesome. There were several little flash effects programs that I liked running on the windows box at work years ago. I got them for virtual pc on my Mac but it was pretty slow. Worked, but was painfully slow. If this improves speed over Virtual PC and I dont have to use that crap that Microsoft has turned it into, then I will be very happy.

[Nermal]

It "should" be faster than VPC in that only the CPU needs to be emulated (I think). However, they're basing the CPU emulation on the notoriously slow Bochs. I suppose we'll just have to wait and see what happens.

[dricci]

If they can get the x86 emulation running fast enough and make this use Aqua natively, they could have a winner that'll be better than Virtual PC because a) you won't have to buy virtual pc + a windows license sine wine emulates all that and b) emulated apps will run along other mac apps instead of in a special emulated environment.

It'd be cool to see Apple help out with this project and include it as part of the system.

[isus]

anything that means i don't hafta buy from ms is good...

vpc = microsoft x 2 (you buy vpc and a windows license)
darwine = opensource.

:)

[TylerL]

This still won't do anything for games, though. (Whatever happened to that DirectX wrapper for OpenGL?!?)

WINE on OS X was always an impossibility. These guys are doing the impossible.
I'm sure some talented people can make some tweaks to Bochs and speed it up quite a bit.
I'll be watching this project with great interest.

[Nermal]

A lot of DirectX is already implemented in Wine. On Linux, the DirectX code is essentially converted to OpenGL, and runs at near-full speed.

[TeknoTurd]

I've got my fingers crossed, but I'm trying not to get my hopes up. They have a long road ahead of them, I hope they can pull it off :)

[mac15]

Its got a few years ahead of it, it needs a few more developers working full time on it to make it worth while but thats the thing with open-source. Projects move alot slower because its more of a hobby than work

[Nermal]

But on the other hand, the number of people available is virtually limitless.

[FattyMembrane]

darwine is now going to use qemu (http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/) for the x86 emulation. i'm not sure when it happened, but it must have been recently. quemu is faster and more efficient than bochs and with darwine's stripped down approach to the emulation layer, we should see decent speeds with this project.

EDIT: i just pulled this from the quemu benchmarks page
Bochs is about 270 times slower than native code on integer code. QEMU is about 65 times faster than Bochs

[TeknoTurd]

excellent news! thanks for keeping us current!

[MrMacMan]

Wake me up when you can run .exe files.

That FAQ has NOthing in it!

:confused:

I have no idea what this product is, meh!

[FattyMembrane]

Originally posted by MrMacman
I have no idea what this product is, meh!
the wine project allows you run windows apps on linux by mimicking the windows system calls (basically, a program sends the windows command for drawing a scroll bar and wine draws the according linux scroll bar). this only works on x86 because windows apps are compiled for x86 so no processor emulation is needed. darwine is at the point where you can compile the source code of some windows programs to run on the mac (since they're compiled for the ppc and can use the wine libraries). once the qemu layer is added, the x86 processor can be emulated and the windows calls will be handled by wine, so you will be able to run windows native .exe files on the mac. this is still a good ways off.

[MrMacMan]

Originally posted by FattyMembrane
the wine project allows you run windows apps on linux by mimicking the windows system calls (basically, a program sends the windows command for drawing a scroll bar and wine draws the according linux scroll bar). this only works on x86 because windows apps are compiled for x86 so no processor emulation is needed. darwine is at the point where you can compile the source code of some windows programs to run on the mac (since they're compiled for the ppc and can use the wine libraries). once the qemu layer is added, the x86 processor can be emulated and the windows calls will be handled by wine, so you will be able to run windows native .exe files on the mac. this is still a good ways off.

Indeed, this should be in the FAQ.

They need a GUI and a way of emulating the processor for .exe files...

A very long way off, if they can get that QEMU emulation they might be good sooner... but alas... still some time needed.