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- >>>>> "Kevin" == Kevin Hayes <hayes@ug.cs.dal.ca> writes:
- In article <1996Jan24.154317.45212@ac.dal.ca> hayes@ug.cs.dal.ca (Kevin Hayes) writes:
-
- >> Personally, I think there are irreversible aspects of such a
- >> decision, because once the System 7 brought to Intel machines,
- >> the customer will no more rely on Apple's hardware, but on the
- >> other side, is not too much risky a move, becaus of the
- >> possibility to have the Copland running only on true Macs, or
- >> other similar arrangements.
- >>
-
- Kevin> MacOS is a stupid idea on Wintel machines - it'd be slower
- Kevin> and there would be mountains of work involved to getting it
- Kevin> to run on all Wintel systems - you're forgetting in the
- Kevin> Wintel world there's no such thing as standards.
-
- MacOS on PC hardware could run very fast via dynamic recompilation*
- and could run blazingly fast if compiler tools were available** to
- allow CPU intensive routines to be compiled into 80x86 code by the
- software author.
-
- There are many standards in the PC world that would be very useful to
- a port of MacOS to PCs, for instance the VESA 2 extensions.
-
- We wrote Executor, a Macintosh emulator that allows PCs to run much
- 68k Macintosh software, and it does so faster on entry level Pentiums
- than any 68k based Macintosh Apple ever released.
-
- We did this all without any help from Apple and we do not use any of
- Apple's ROMs or System file, nor have we disassembled any of Apple's
- ROM or System file. By doing it this way we have not been able to
- support all of System 7, much less support post System 7 features like
- QuickTime. In addition, there are still enough compatbility problems
- that many programs do not work. *However*, if we could license System
- 7.5, we could fairly easily get a very large degree of compatibility,
- since we'd be using Apple's code with all its quirks, rather than our
- rewrite from incomplete and inaccurate documentation.
-
- See http://www.ardi.com for more information about Executor.
- There is also an Executor newsgroup: comp.emulators.mac.executor.
-
- We continue on a day to day basis assuming that Apple is not
- interested in embracing our technology, and that is their decision,
- but MacOS 7.5 could run very quickly indeed on PCs.
-
- What we have done is *much* more difficult than what QUIX has done,
- and infinitely more useful if Apple ever wants to reward their
- software developers and potentially take on Microsoft on Intel based
- PC hardware.
-
- Intel is not the enemy.
-
- --Cliff
- ctm@ardi.com
-
- __________________
- *We've done this already.
- **We will do this in '96
-
-