Mac OS X emulation a reality?

[NetRyder]

Looks like we have the first major breakthrough in terms of PowerPC emulation on the x86 platform. PearPC is an open-source project that can emulate a "crippled" PowerPC G3 machine.

Basically, it's the first release, still at 0.1, so it's buggy and unstable. But what's really interesting is you can actually go through a complete installation of Mac OS X on an x86 machine. Problem right now is once you're done with that, you end up with endless kernel panics. Besides, it's too slow to do anything substantial at this stage. Seems to run the PPC version of Mandrake Linux just fine though, as per reports.

Great to see that the first hurdle has been crossed. Being able to go through the whole OS X installation is very impressive. Going to keep my eye on this project. It seems to have tremendous potential once things are optimized. Just have to hope Apple doesn't get all whiny about this.

Check out the site more info and screenshots:
http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/

 

[SPeedY_B]

Wonder how long it will be before the project is taken down.

 

[Xie]

Wish I had a "test" system that had descent specs and a copy of OSX 🙁

 

[SPeedY_B]

Even if you had a top end P4EE it would still run like XP on a 186. 😉
Apparently it emulates Mandrake fine, but OSX runs, or rawther crawls, quite (read: extremely) slow.

 

[Xie]

Even if you had a top end P4EE it would still run like XP on a 186. 😉
Apparently it emulates Mandrake fine, but OSX runs, or rawther crawls, quite (read: extremely) slow.

p186 or not I would run it just for the hell of it 😛

 

[SPeedY_B]

I'd just buy a mac.. saves time 😛

 

[Tuffgong4]

yeah but once all oses can be run or emulated on most systems this will create better competition and might bring mac prices down which is what hurts most people...I will never have just a pc or just a mac because there are such pluses to both but IJust can't afford a mac right now...jobs you bastard

 

[Xie]

I'd just buy a mac.. saves time 😛

Yeah but would be like bending over and taking $ wise 😛

 

[NetRyder]

Wonder how long it will be before the project is taken down.

Apple can go shove it.

Honestly though, the project is branded as a "PPC emulator" which means it can run any PPC-based operating system. If Apple has a problem with the project, all the programmers need to do is remove all references to Mac OS X on their project pages.
Apple doesn't own the PPC platform itself. So technically, they can't touch a project that claims to be able to run PPC Linux on the x86 platform, for example. Only thing is everyone will know that it's capable of running OS X now that the news is already out.

The Mac OS X EULA states that OS X should not be used on anything other than Apple hardware. Since that's the case, anyone using PearPC to run OS X will be breaking the EULA, but the project itself doesn't.

 

[NetRyder]

Wish I had a "test" system that had descent specs and a copy of OSX 🙁

I wouldn't go through the trouble at this stage if I were you. The fact that the "About this Mac" box displays "PowerPC G3 0 MHz" does say something. It's slow and buggy to the extent of being unusable at this point. You might get a kick out of just booting to the desktop (which takes 10 minutes after a 3 hour long install, by the way), but there's not much more you can do after that.

Give it time. I doubt the project is just going to fade away after the first hurdle has been crossed.

 

[NetRyder]

Sorry for the multiple posts, but I just noticed that people are making more progress with this new toy. Seems like the JITC version is a little faster than the initial build, although not nearly close to being completely useable.

Credit to "jedavis1" from Neowin for this screenshot. You can see that he was actually able to run a complete game of Chess. Apparently, iTunes and iPhoto seem to be working too. Very cool.

 

[Grandmaster]

Very cool, I'll watch out for this! 😛