Porting Winderz apps to Mac!

[The village idiot]

Apple has some guidelines to porting Winderz apps to the OSX platform. Also links to tools and books (some in .pdf). If you're using C or C++ to write your code, chances are good that you could port it to Mac. Might open up some of the freeware tools that are used in our hobby.

You Mac guys need to spread the word!

Anyway here is the link:

http://developer.apple.com/macosx/win32porting/

[mysticgohan17]

bump, TMPGEnc and VirtualDub for Mac, cool 8) . now we're even.

[tgpo]

As long as no one ports Windows over I'll be happy :P

[The village idiot]

I still wish someone would do a full port of X to x86 machines. Something that would allow full binary compatibility. Mostly we just need the Aqua layer and things would be good. But so far Apple won't play that game.

[sterno]

I still wish someone would do a full port of X to x86 machines. Something that would allow full binary compatibility. Mostly we just need the Aqua layer and things would be good. But so far Apple won't play that game.

Full binary compatibility means you have to emulate all the hardware. That's rarely pretty and never fast.

[The village idiot]

I still wish someone would do a full port of X to x86 machines. Something that would allow full binary compatibility. Mostly we just need the Aqua layer and things would be good. But so far Apple won't play that game.

Full binary compatibility means you have to emulate all the hardware. That's rarely pretty and never fast.

Beos would run the same apps on both x86 and mac platforms! They ran fast on x86, didn't have a mac to check with at the time. All the compatability would be handled in the OS kernel. Standard calls is standard calls. Should work just fine, but maybe not.

[sterno]

The same apps? Yes. The same binaries? No. The binaries you were running on Intel were Intel-compiled binaries. The binaries you would have been running on PowerPC would have been PowerPC-compiled binaries. But you wouldn't have needed to know anything about that because the overwhelming majority of BeOS applications had installers that figured out what platform you were on and installed the right binary automatically. Since all the APIs were the same on both platforms it was trivial to make an application run on both, and cross-compiling with gcc is usually pretty straightforward so developers didn't really even need both platforms.

One other possibility to do something like this would be an extension of the old "fat binary" system that Apple used during the 68k/PowerPC transition - the same executable contained the code for both, and the system recognized it as a fat binary and used the right code. Since modern OS X apps use the OpenStep style where an application is actually a directory, it would be pretty straightforward to put a system like that together for another hardware platform. But vendors and developers would still have to actually make these fat binaries for you to run the app on both.

[The village idiot]

I have also heard mention of self compiling apps. So it would be source on disk, and have a compiler app (or 2) to make the binary. That would be great except for the code stealing thieves. I guess you are right about Beos binaries.