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Monday, June 06, 2005

Bizarre Math



Apple + Intel + WINE = Dead Longhorn?

That's probably wildly unrealistic. WINE hasn't been able to topple Windows gaming through Linux ... but then again OSX really is a different kind of beast. Apple has been insanely good at hiding the tech underbelly of BSD within it's products. If they were able to make a really solid, user-friendly version of WINE part of the OS ... could help swing things in their favor.

5 comments:

Josh said...

I kinda wonder how the hardware will play out. Consumer-friendly would obviously be to embrace the chaos that is the PC-Clone market, but Jobs has shown an aversion to having OSX run on clones in the past ... and allowing OSX to run on any Winbox is the ultimate in cloneware, so to speak.

As for OSX/Nix binaries ... I'm moderately hopeful. It's good that Jobs & Co have been playing with this in secret for years, that XCode is going to be ready to play nice with either set of binaries, etc. But as comforting as that is - my head is kinda like ... wow. For a few years every OSX developer will have to worry about two sets of iron.

Oh well, was thinking the girl needed a laptop anyway...

Unknown said...

Actually, as the article you linked to pointed out, all you would have to do is create a dual-boot feature so that windows users could boot into XP to play games, and then boot into OSX to do everything else.

What really excites me is the prospect of cheap mac boxes. I've got two old pentiums sitting in my attic-- if I could run OSX on them, I'd be a happy camper.

Josh said...

I suppose I do have a better reason to rebuild the PC-puter now. A dual boot on that machine would keep me from having yet-another-box around.

I guess I just wonder ... how much will this complicate OSX development? I mean, before this Mac users could rely on a hardware setup similar to consoles. You knew what a box would run. If I dev an OSX game now, will I have to worry about someone's offbrand vidcard blowing up?

Josh said...

Ah thank you. As I noted on MBB that's what I heard but I didn't have any valid source.

Sadly it's probably easy these days to design hardware/software that does that ... what with DRM-style mobos and all.

Part of me is sad, because it would be nice to dual boot my existing machine, but part of me is glad because I think it will keep OSX easier to dev for.

Josh said...

It's interesting that some of the mac devs (see "Mac Game Devs on Intel Mac" that I just posted) declare that a WINE like emulator would kill the port community, and to an extent the Mac gamedev community as well.