03-29-2006, 02:40 PM
There are people playing Doom and other, rather demanding games under WINE. It can be done. With support from a large able-bodied corporate entity it would likely improve quite a bit. Or, are you still talking about the benchmarks for cross-platform emulators, PPC vs. Pentium? Those will always suck. I'm talking about Mactels running Windows Apps. Remember, WINE stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator. It is running Windows apps natively on Linux. It is a difficult process because lots of the needed code is still closed source and needs to be reverse engeineered, but it does work, and fairly well. I've run MS Office under WINE. It worked pretty well until it hit some function that required IE which caused it to blow up.
I have no doubt that they could do this, I just don't think that it is a good idea. Why? Apple, as they usually do, will make this work so well and so seamlessly that users won't know when they are running a native Windows app or a Mac app. All of the security problems and crappy coding present in Windows code could become viable on the Mac as well. This could kill at a minimum the functioning of the Windows apps, but possibly even bring the Mac down.
I have no doubt that they could do this, I just don't think that it is a good idea. Why? Apple, as they usually do, will make this work so well and so seamlessly that users won't know when they are running a native Windows app or a Mac app. All of the security problems and crappy coding present in Windows code could become viable on the Mac as well. This could kill at a minimum the functioning of the Windows apps, but possibly even bring the Mac down.