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Future of ARDI in general (was Re: BeBox Port??????)
>>>>> "Kurt" == Kurt R Glaesemann <kurtg@iastate.edu> writes:
Kurt> I think I will jump the gun (Ok, how about a whole army of
Kurt> guns) and ask.
Kurt> A new dual CPU PowerPC computer has popped up called the
Kurt> BeBox. It has very little software since it was designed
Kurt> from the ground up with no backwards compatability (see
Kurt> http://www.be.com/). This would be a good market for
Kurt> executor since the'll be a dearth of software in the
Kurt> begining (not to mention that the box's look pretty
Kurt> powerful. I could just see it now "I own a PowerPC computer
Kurt> that run's mac apps, but not the native ones!!": proof that
Kurt> truth can be stranger than fiction.
We've read about it and we're fairly interested, even though future
BeBox machines will be CHRP compliant and as such will theoretically
be able to run MacOS once Copland is released ('97 at best -- we're
not the only one who slips release dates of major new versions).
It turns out that Mat has been working on a successor to syn68k for a
while. The successor will make writing different backends much easier
and should also be able to use different front ends. Additionally,
the code that the successor generates will be much faster than what
syn68k generates. A PPC backend has already been written for this new
synthetic CPU, so we've planned on putting Executor on the PPC for a
while now.
However, when we get Executor to run on the PPC, we'll also support
native PPC apps since adding that support should actually be fairly
easy, so the "but not the native ones" disclaimer will probably not
apply for any amount of time greater than three or four months, if
ever.
But Mat's syn68k successor can also have different front-ends, so our
plan is to allow Executor to run PPC Mac apps on non-PPC machines as
well.
So, when 2.0 is shipping and we have some extra dollars, we'll
*probably* pick up a Be Box and do an internal proof of concept port.
We don't expect Be to be particularly interested in our work because
eventually they'll have Copland and in the meantime, using ARDI's
technology is overkill, since they could also just as easily get some
clever engineers like Jim Drew, the Quix engineers, the author of
ShapeShifter, or half a dozen other people/teams who could get Mac
programs to run under the BeOS -- a simple task when compared to what
we do.
There would be a couple slight differences though. Executor would of
course be running totally native on the PPC, while Copland will still
have portions running under emulation and with any Apple based port of
the Mac OS, Apple would play a significant role in determining the
price of the ported OS, while we could set the Executor/Be price to be
fairly low if Be decided they liked our work enough to bundle it with
every machine they shipped.
Right now people who think of SoftWindows when they think emulation
technology in general, or who think of Executor 1.2 or even 1.99<x>
where <x> < 'p' probably don't have a particularly good opinion of
emulators. We will try very hard to change people's mind with 2.0's
release. If we convince only a tiny fraction of our potential
customer base that we're worth taking a chance on, then the resultant
revenues will enable us to make the next release of Executor after 2.0
have at least as much improvement as you've seen between 1.99k and
1.99p3.
--Cliff
ctm@ardi.com
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