bradhaak
Member

Registered: Oct 2000
Location:
Posts: 380 |
Unlike Classic Coke, The OSX Classic mode really is OS9 running inside of OSX. Any apps that have followed Apples programming guidelines should run just fine. This means that apps that write directly to hardware (such as the screen), are the ones most likely to have problems. The kind of apps that blow up are generally multimedia apps and games. A lot of games blow up really well. Some just have little wierd behaviors. Total Annhilation still has the the dock floating around the bottom of the screen - it makes gameplay suck. There really isn't much excuse for this since Apple has been telling developers for over fifteen years to stay in the guidlines or possibly get screwed up with new OS releases. Every time the OS has been upgraded there have been a few apps that broke. This is just a much bigger upgrade, so more bad apps died.
If you have incompatible apps that you need to run, it takes about a minute to reboot into OS9. My needs might be a little different than most, but I haven't booted to OS9 for anything execpt games in a couple of months, and most new games are compatible with OSX.
Yes Darwin runs fine on PC hardware. I think that besides the obvious desire to control the entire platform, the biggest reason that OSX ihas not been ported to PCs (and no plans for the immediate future that I know of), is because of the device driver issue. Apple controls the hardware environment that OSX lives in. There are a limited number of processors, core logic sets, graphics cards etc. To enter the PC environment, it would have to support hundreds (thousands??) times as many different devices. With the chances of being able to pull this off and unseat Windows being pretty low, is it worth destroying the current business to take the risk?
BTW - did you see the rumors yesterday about Apple seeding independent developers with 1.6 Ghz G5 systems? I can't wait.
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