MAc and PC OS

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UserFriendlyOS

MAc and PC OS

Post by UserFriendlyOS »

I have a ?. I am going to start on development on an OS and I was wondering if it is even possible to make an OS for the PC that can run PC and Mac applications on the same OS. I want to be able to run them stand alone with out using an emulator. Please email with any comments advice or anything. My email is [email protected]
Thanx
Peter_Vigren

Re:MAc and PC OS

Post by Peter_Vigren »

Hm... without a emulator... I don't know if that is possible... because PC and Mac should have different machine language and system architecture... should they not?
frank

Re:MAc and PC OS

Post by frank »

after recompiling the application that'll be possible.
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Re:MAc and PC OS

Post by Pype.Clicker »

there are several application that can be portable on both PC/Linux (based on a x86 processor) and MAC/OSX (based on a PowerPC processor), because you compile the application's source for the target platform.

if you don't want to release your application's sources, you can either use an intermediate language (some kind of bytecode) that will be translated into the target machine's own code at installation time or opt for some Java-like mechanism (just-in-time compiling)

Note that as a final solution, you could ship several binary version of your applications for the different target platform, but on a single medium
Jamethiel

Re:MAc and PC OS

Post by Jamethiel »

Uh-huh. Recompiling an application that you don't have the source code to. And that's assuming that you don't want to run all that fun 68k-based software that runs in emulation on the real thing, uses the CFM code conventions, and some of which rewrites it's code on the fly.

On the other paw, I've long thought it'd be neat to have a PC operating system that used all the old MacOS 7 APIs and code conventions, used HFS and HFS+ disks natively, and so on. The main problem is the lack of PC-relative data addressing instructions on the PC. You'd have to write all-new applications for it, of course, but it'd still be neat.
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Re:MAc and PC OS

Post by Pype.Clicker »

errr ... just another thing that would make the binary-to-binary translation very approximative: PC are little-endian and MAC are big-endian, iirc.
neowert

Re:MAc and PC OS

Post by neowert »

Actually mac can run in big or little endian
Jamethiel

Re:MAc and PC OS

Post by Jamethiel »

Modern Macs might be able to run in either big or little endian mode, but...

Historically, macs have been big endian. This was dictated by their being based around the (excellent) 68k architecture.

Can they really switch the endianness of the structures used for the windowing system and various syscalls? That sounds a little far-fetched to me.
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