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Has anyone tried Wintel on Intel Macs?

bugfaceuk

bugfaceuk

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Nov 10, 2005
415
13
I think we all saw the news announcement a week or so ago that WinTel is now built as a Universal Binary, and that it does not do code translation on the Intel platform.

In theory this should yield (over translated code) a significant performance boost, or to put it the other way around, remove a significant proportion of the performance penalty from code translation between x86 and PPC.

Has anyone run it? What's it like? Any qualitative measures of performance?

Thanks in advance!
 
Until microsoft vista comes out it won't work because it mac hardware doesn't use bios. it uses emi. I think of something like that. Windows server 2003 however I think may work. Running windows on my apple hardware would make me feel sick anyway. Not going to happen. Will always have a PC though, don't want to lose touch with it.
 
Reading is good

Guys, read that post again, he asked about WinTel, an emulator, not Windows itself. I'd be interested in some first-hand experience with this, too!
 
It's just a custom version of Bochs http://bochs.sourceforge.net/

From what I understand, it is basically like Virtual PC on the Mac (emulates a 2D graphics card and basic Intel Pentium PC). So you won't be able to play any games on it or anything like that.

Darwine (Mac OS version of Wine) looks like it will be the best Windows emulation type software until someone finds a way to boot Windows on an Intel Mac or M$ come out with a new version of Virtual PC. You can already play many Windows games on the Linux version.
 
hvfsl said:
It's just a custom version of Bochs http://bochs.sourceforge.net/

From what I understand, it is basically like Virtual PC on the Mac (emulates a 2D graphics card and basic Intel Pentium PC). So you won't be able to play any games on it or anything like that.

Darwine (Mac OS version of Wine) looks like it will be the best Windows emulation type software until someone finds a way to boot Windows on an Intel Mac or M$ come out with a new version of Virtual PC. You can already play many Windows games on the Linux version.
Click to expand...

All that understood, it does package it neatly. I'm not after games, but it would provide a good indicator of potential "VMWare" performance.

Darwine provides the hope that a 1:1 peformance could be achieved if you get the applications to run. However, Darwine does not seem to be moving forward all that rapidly, I wonder what Crossover Crew are up to? No news since the update.

And to the rest of the posters above, I was asking about dual booting for Bod's sake!
 
TheT said:
Guys, read that post again, he asked about WinTel, an emulator, not Windows itself. I'd be interested in some first-hand experience with this, too!
Click to expand...

I think people may be a little over-focused on the whole dual-boot race right now ;-) Although I would have thought that despite posts I've made, people would not assume I was so stupid that MS would have built a universal binary vista or xp!
 
bugfaceuk said:
I think we all saw the news announcement a week or so ago that WinTel is now built as a Universal Binary, and that it does not do code translation on the Intel platform.

In theory this should yield (over translated code) a significant performance boost, or to put it the other way around, remove a significant proportion of the performance penalty from code translation between x86 and PPC.

Has anyone run it? What's it like? Any qualitative measures of performance?

Thanks in advance!
Click to expand...
You do understand that OpenOSX, the sellers of Wintel, has one of the worst reputations of any Mac developer. They take opensource software, package it poorly, and provide terrible support. Their Wintel product is just a modified version of Bochs, the free opensource x86 emulator. I have never heard anyone claim that OpenOSX's modifications justify the price they charge for this free software. If you want to buy Wintel, then that it your choice. But remember that it only encourages them.
 
TheT said:
Guys, read that post again, he asked about WinTel, an emulator, not Windows itself. I'd be interested in some first-hand experience with this, too!
Click to expand...

hehe, I always do that!
 
MisterMe said:
You do understand that OpenOSX, the sellers of Wintel, has one of the worst reputations of any Mac developer. They take opensource software, package it poorly, and provide terrible support. Their Wintel product is just a modified version of Bochs, the free opensource x86 emulator. I have never heard anyone claim that OpenOSX's modifications justify the price they charge for this free software. If you want to buy Wintel, then that it your choice. But remember that it only encourages them.
Click to expand...

Well you know, I can't comment on the value/quality, but $25 is a sufficiently small amount for me that it could be worth it in order to avoid some hassle. But that's as maybe, I am still curious to know if there has been a significant speed bump on Mactel hardware, although as the poster above says, bochs is available as a universal binary.
 
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