News OSX on x86 a reality?

As you may know, GOO's having his mid life crisis at the moment, and has purchased a Mac. So this snippet of news from MacRumours intrigued me - an emulator that allows any pukka PowerPC OS to run on x86 hardware:

PearPC 0.1 is an early version of a "an architecture independent PowerPC platform emulator capable of running most PowerPC operating systems". The emulator offers emulation for various PowerPC operating systems including Mac OS X 10.3

Seems that it's a bit slow at the moment, but hey, it's it's first release. It's amazing the thing boots at all! (yes, that's OSX in a window in XP)

Anyway - if development continues and doesn't go 'pear-shaped', then this could be an excellent way to try the Mac OS out without any need to jump camps.

/GOO watches with interest.

 

that is funktastic tbh

 

This could be big. I've always liked macOS, but never been able to justify spending all that money on Mac Hardware ($$$Expensive).


I wonder if this could possibly drive Apple to produce a full version of it's next os for the x86 platform.

[Sillyness} Lets just hope this pear doesn't turn out top be a misshapen Lemon.{/sillyness]

 

There's already a version of OSX for x86. It just won't see the light of day inless IBM's PPC can't cut the mustard at some point in the future. They (Apple) have been parallel developing PPC and x86 versions of the code, as at one point they almost made the 'switch' to Intel - Plus the foundation of OSX was the old NeXT OS, which was pretty much processor independant.

 

UPDATE

I had thought the development of Pear PC had gone pear shaped and that work had stopped due to the death if of one of the co-developers, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

There's a new release out (0.3.0) that signigicantly speeds up the emulation - the emulated PPC now runs about 15 times slower than the host CPU (when using the Just In Time x86 Compiler version), rather than 40 times slower. It's still probably still too slow for practical use, but it's a step in the right direction.

Check it out, here.