PPC Emulation

avieth · Veteran Joined: 17 Sep 2004 Posts: 1945 Location: Canada

Linux has wine for windows apps, so why not a program to run mac apps? I know I know, there would have to be processor emulation and that would slow the thing down a lot, but I think its a good idea. A program similar to wine that runs mac executables. Would this be worth it?

Archangel1 · Veteran Joined: 21 Apr 2004 Posts: 1212 Location: Work

Well as you say it would be sloooooow. As I understand it, the differences in architectures are particularly nasty - x86 having many less registers makes it very hard to emulate PPC.

There is something called PearPC which is a PPC emulator of some description. Last thing I heard was it was possible to install OSX on it, but it took like two days.

Edit: It also occurs that as you say you could do something like Wine, so you could run OSX apps under Linux/PPC with 'no' performance hit. AFAIK this doesn't exist; Wine is difficult enough as it is, and there aren't the volume of apps for OSX that there are for Windows; there aren't anywhere near as many PPC users; and I suspect more OSX apps have Linux versions.
It's more a logistical thing than a technical thing I suspect.
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What are you, stupid?

brot · Guru Joined: 06 Apr 2004 Posts: 322

The answer is kindda simple. And in portage, too. It is also supported.

http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/status.html

qemu is normally used to emulate a 2nd pc, mostly x86. But it has also another working mode, which is the User emulation...
Well, all is well documented, the only thing you have to do is emerge qemu.

Have fun