CherryOS Mac Emulator Resurfaces

[MacBytes]

Category: 3rd Party Software
Link: CherryOS Mac Emulator Resurfaces
Posted on MacBytes.com

Approved by Mudbug

 

[LimeiBook86]

Yay!

I downloaded the trial and when I get home from school I'll try it out and tell you all how it is....but looking at the amount of posts here that won't be too many people.

 

[narco]

Yeah, from what I've heard it's nothing special. Lots of bugs, and some users can't even get it to work. Still interesting though, but will probably only be as good as VirtualPC (and that isn't saying much).

Fishes,
narco.

 

[LimeiBook86]

Yeah, from what I've heard it's nothing special. Lots of bugs, and some users can't even get it to work. Still interesting though, but will probably only be as good as VirtualPC (and that isn't saying much).

Fishes,
narco.

Yeah, and I read on the 'Known Issues' that there is NO SOUND support........yet. Which means they will upgrade it with sound in a few months haha.

I'm not expecting it to be great but, I would like playing around with it

 

[isgoed]

Still interesting though, but will probably only be as good as VirtualPC (and that isn't saying much).

This is the other way arround (Mac on PC)

 

[narco]

This is the other way arround (Mac on PC)

I know. I meant that this program will probably be no better than running Windows on a Mac via VirtualPC. Because VPC is slow, and this is slow, and will probably always be slow.

Fishes,
narco.

 

[DavidLeblond]

Yeah, and I read on the 'Known Issues' that there is NO SOUND support........yet. Which means they will upgrade it with sound in a few months haha.

That means they'll add sound support as soon as the PearPC group does it for them.

 

[Lacero]

This poses some real questions:

Will the PearPC team sue this guy for violating the GPL, now that the product has come to the market?

Does the GPL have full legal respect in court or will the courts treated it as a "delete your evaluation copy in 24 hours" readme file?

I'm very curious how the PearPC team will respond to this.

 

[tpatricks]

Why go to the trouble?

This poses some real questions...

This guy supposedly was working here in Hawaii when he announced his cherry had popped last year.

The real question is "why bother?" Are there that many people who'd be willing to pay for another VERY slow application to run another OS?

Seems like an awful lot of effort for something that's nearly worthless.

Hmmm. That could be politics, too, eh?
-

 

[nagromme]

Wow, it really sounds like this is likely to use stolen code. Based on PearPC with lots of evidence--even while the author denies that!

I certainly wouldn't be giving them money until that is answered!

And is this actually much better than the open source PearPC anyway?

 

[tutubibi]

Wow, it really sounds like this is likely to use stolen code. Based on PearPC with lots of evidence--even while the author denies that!

I certainly wouldn't be giving them money until that is answered!

And is this actually much better than the open source PearPC anyway?

I downloaded trial version. Looks like it is just a poor wrapper around PearPC.
It comes with compressed HD images from 3GB to 12GB and simple GUI to create config files.

Could not load Mandrake PPC version. And it's sloooow, same as PearPC.

If they mentioned that it's PearPC beneath and respected GPL, I would not have issue with someone selling GUI wrapper around GPL-ed product. But problem is this guy is claiming it's all his code so we are talking about theft here. PearPC has to investigate and take actions somehow.

On similar note, I noticed that there are many of this emulators popping up recently that "forget" to mention open source projects they "borrow" code from.

If you are interested, more discussion on CherryOS is going on osnews and slashdot.

 

[Nermal]

If you are interested, more discussion on CherryOS is going on osnews and slashdot.

And here.

 

[LimeiBook86]

Well I just installed Mac OS X Panther on my PC using CherryOS...and let me say...it's 'Ok', but it's not with it's flaws....it's many, many flaws.

The Test Machine

Home-Made Wintel Box
2.24ghz Penitum 4 PC
1gig of DDR RAM
120gb Segate ATA 100 Hard Drive
DVD±RW drive
nVidia Geforce 6 Series 6200TD (128mb AGP8x)
USB Apple Keyboard and USB Logitech Optical Mouse
Standard speakers
Standard VGA Monitor
Genuine Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther" Install Discs

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Mac OS X shows the processor speed as a 901mhz machine, but the 'lag' is similar to VirtualPC...But, in my experience CherryOS reacts faster than VirtualPC.

Pros: Lets you run Mac OS X on your Windows Machine without any hardware modification, Sort of an inexpensive way to play around with Mac OS X, Mac OS X installed rather quickly, about an hour or so (only disc 1 - Didn't see the disc 2 had to cancel)

Cons: No Sound support yet, networking doesn't seem to work correctly (For me at least), emulation stops for 1-5 seconds at a time at random times (Like VirtualPC sometimes, although this is more frequent), Couldn't install Mac OS X fully since the Installer didn't even see the second Mac OS X Install disc (Had to cancel), CD-ROM support doesn't seem to be working for me, technically illegal according to Apple's Mac OS X License, Initial setup is a real pain because of the virtual hard drive image mostly. This software is NOT recommended to novices at all, even tech savvy people such as myself had a little trouble with this.

Virtual Hard Drive Madness

It took me a long time to even get a virtual Mac Partition on my hard drive. As you know without this you can't install Mac OS X. You have some options when making a disk image to install Mac OS X on. The smallest size is 3gb and the biggest size is 15gb. If you select the drive to be 'Growable' it doesn't seem to work, and I've tried this about 7 times. But, if you select let's say a 5gb drive and choose it to be not 'Growable' it works just fine.

Let me explain a bit. While you are creating a 'Profile' for your new virtual machine it goes through a process. You name the profile, choose your disk space, and then it will create a disk image for your OS X partition, then it will allow you to Start-up the Virtual Mac.

Now when you do-not choose a 'Growable' drive option you will see a screen that will tell you in about 10-15 minutes (actually takes less than 5 minutes) the virtual disk image will be formated and ready to use, but when you choose 'Growable' as an option for your disk image it skips that step and the Mac OS X Installer will not even see your virtual disk image, thus you can't install Mac OS X.

The Bottom Line

If you want to play around with Mac OS X without buying a Macintosh then go to the CherryOS webpage and download a free 14 day trial. Don't expect it to work perfectly (if at all) like a Mac would, you should expect it to be slow, unresponsive at times, and you will have problems with mounting CDs, Networking, and Sound. If you really want to run Mac OS X that badly go ahead. It's a good way to test out Mac OS X but this emulator has a lot of cons, but then again it's in it's first version. I would expect later versions and/or updates to fix or improve most of the current problems. If this emulation program can eventually get it's act together then this might become a great success for the company, and another target for Apple's lawyers.

EDIT: I have plenty of screenshots, I'll be happy to post them when I get home in like 2-3 hours.

 

[bousozoku]

Wow, it really sounds like this is likely to use stolen code. Based on PearPC with lots of evidence--even while the author denies that!

I certainly wouldn't be giving them money until that is answered!

And is this actually much better than the open source PearPC anyway?

It was already proven by the author of PearPC a few months ago because there was some information that had not be changed from PearPC.

If it's only an edit to remove the original author's information, a re-compile and a GUI shell, that's not enough to charge for it and it shows poor ethics.

 

[~loserman~]

It was already proven by the author of PearPC a few months ago because there was some information that had not be changed from PearPC.

If it's only an edit to remove the original author's information, a re-compile and a GUI shell, that's not enough to charge for it and it shows poor ethics.

IF they used PearPC completly without editing out the Authors info or removing the GPL stuff. They could legitimately sell this product. As long as they include the source code and GPL with it.

That is how Redhat and Suse do business.

 

[Candyfingered]

I hear this CherryOS is slow as all heck. Though I must say I'm considering getting it so that my dad can finally see the wonders of the Mac OS.

 

[banjo_1928]

It works - but not as advertised

There is no access to USB peripherals - other than mouse and K/b. The mouse does not even work properly as the right button and scroll wheel are both disabled. No sign of my web cam (Logitech Pro 4000) that works fine in both Windows and on my 'real' Mac.

System Profile shows the emulator as Power Mac G3(PCI Graphics) with a PowerPC G4(0.0) cpu. Looks just like my Beige G3 with G4 upgrade card.

dmesg (from Terminal) shows indeed it is emulating a Gossamer mobo
Got boot device: IOService:/GossamerPE/pci@80000000/AppleGracklePCI...

Networking worked - despite the warning about having to renumber my LAN because it doesnt agree with their addressing scheme. I just ignored the warning.

It works - its slow but has not paniced or crashed in any way. Doubt I will register it but was intersting to set up.

 

[slooksterPSV]

Right now, I'm very disappointed at the speed of it. I know that my specs aren't tops, but I'm running on an AMD Duron 1.10GHZ 384MB RAM system. So far, I've been trying to load up disk utility for 20 minutes. I think they need to work on this program a bit better. With virtual PC, you can run that on a 400MHz G3 Mac, and it emulates Windows quite well. Why doesn't Mac come out with something so you can emulate Mac OS X on Mac for testing environments, such as servers?

Heck PearPC runs better! How do I know? I took screens of it, and the installation went WAY WAY faster than this.