Hi.

Just wondering if anyone tried to run LFS with VirtualPC on an MacOS X system? Or any other PC emulating software that I am aware of? I know there are Linux users doing it so it would be interesting to see how it fared on the new Intel-based Macs...

And before you start asking why when it works so well on PC (which it does), the reasons for moving (back) to MacOS are my own and noone elses thankyouverymuch

Being a programmer, I am also a bit curious as to the hassle of porting LFS to Macs. There are lots of interesting talk about porting PC games to Intel-based Macs and based on the little knowledge I have on how LFS is architected it seems like an excellent candidate for porting. The amount of good racing sims/games on Macs are fewer than few...

Even if you get LFS to run in VPC, it wont do so well. The Virtual Machine which vpc emulates only has a onboard-style graphics chip (=software rendering) so it wont produce that nice graphics.
An Intel-Based Mac doesnt really simplify the whole thing, the program still has to be prepared for OSX, it needs to become a "Universal-Binary" (which is comin out for WoW soon afaik -.-)
What I wanna say: Even if you get LFS to run, it wont be fun. ^^

MacOS X is unix based so you may be able to run WineX (or regular Wine) on it and be able to play.

Porting would be a massive job unless the code is abstracted. Windows specific network calls, and directx calls alone must go in to the thousands, not to mention the amount of stuctures / objects that the platform dependant stuffs rely on for i/o.

It's not really about the architecture, cos at the end of the day if the underlying libs aren't there to support an app, it isn't going to run without switching to one which exists on all target platforms, or suitably abstracting the interfaces such that you can create your own platform specifics.... unless you use an emulator / api translation lib.

Checkout DarWINE. I also believe that codeweavers, the people behind crossover office for linux are working on supporting crossover on Mac OSX.

Wine is out of question here because wine doesn't support have (good) force feedback support.

Vain

Thanks for all the answers (and no flaming, weeee, the LFS crowd is great as usual).

I will test DarWINE on a friends "old" Mac and get back to you, thanks for the great tip!

Regarding VPC, I was curious since the next VPC will be more tightly integrated with the underlying hardware due to the new Intel-based chipset. If it at all started using VPC today, it would be an indication on how it will perform with the next release.

Regarding porting. There still are some open questions, but there really are some worried Mac coders who fear that the ease of porting PC games to MacIntel is going to make Mac-specific coding to be a thing of the past. And since I have a vague memory of reading that LFS does a lot of its own graphic and sound optimization rather than handling it to DirectX-code I was hoping that the platform-specific code would be an overcomingly task, more so than Counter-strike and World of Warcraft (the last one being available for Mac). I have worked in the software industry for over ten years so I do understand that the project would recquire both time and skill. Still, it would be an interesting challenge...

This last discussion would be interesting to put to the LFS team, if for nothing else, to satisfy my curiosity...

More tips or experience is much appreciated! If anyone is even remotely interested, I will post my findings here. There can be nothing wrong with spreading the LFS to an even wider audience...

Please let me know if it will work... At the moment I am awaiting the arrival of my Macbook Pro, and will no longer use a Windows Based PC, yet was thinking of buying S2... Currently an avid Demo racer!!

First of all I tried the skin viewer with Virual PC and it didn't start, so this is no option.
With the new Intel based Mac is looks better. There is already a Wine version that work on the Intel Macs (http://forum.osx86project.org/index.php?showtopic=8699) but I don't know if LFS will run with this version, and I have no MacBook to test this.
One other option is to install/run Linux an try WineX there. I think it is possible to get LFS work, because on a normal PC with Linux LFS works fine, except the force feedback wheels.

Actually, I am thinking in that direction as well. Since the DarWINE thing fel short (no DarWINE on Intel Macs yet) and WINE still doesn´t handle system calls yet, my next idea is dual-booting with Linux (Ubuntu) running Cedega. This would still get me a dual boot, but without Windows.

Even though Intel Macs are booting Windows XP, the graphics drivers does not work so that would not work I guess.. Yet...

If Cedega would run on Inte Mac OS X, I would switch tomorrow...

Havent you noticed those latest news that it is already possible to run windows on macs? Maybe this will be made public soon (dont know all the details).

Yes it is possible to install Windows XP on the new Intel Macs. I've also seen vidoes where someone run HL2 on a Mac mini and on a Macbook. Video drivers are only available for the Mac Mini, but I think that also soon drivers will be available for the other Intel Macs (see http://wiki.onmac.net/index.php/Users/Drivers)
One problem that is left is if force feedback devices will work.

Yup, but using WinXP on a Mac really does genuinely defeat the whole purpose of moving to a Mac!

I have a Mac here and I have to say I end up using the PC most of the time. The security features of OSX are great and all, but at the end of the day the hardware/OS is only there to run the applications and therein lies the problem.

More and more software is becoming multi-platform though and a lot of indi development tools are coming out now which are multi-platform (BlitzMax and PureBasic for instance).

The problem for C++ coders (and I am assuming LFS is coded in C++) working on the PC is if they use a library which has no Mac equivellent then whatever library they used has to be totally replaced with something new on the Mac.

When porting to the Mac right now all the work must be done twice for each processor platform. When developing on the Mac in the first instance everything is pretty much handled for you, but if LFS was coded on a Mac we'd already have a Mac version...

In terms of getting LFS working i'd say there's a chance that the Intel based machines might do a reasonable job, certainly an Intel based iMac running VirtualPC emulatore under the Rosetta emulator under OSX is going to be a bad move though (Rosetta is hopeless at audio/visual stuff - let alone Virtual PC).

A PPC based G5 would do a better job of running the game under VirtualPC than an Intel iMac and you're in for a low framerate there - even if you owned a Quad G5 as LFS doesn't appear to multi-thread so you're stuck at the speed of a single Mac processor and doing all of your video rendering through the CPU too, which is also having to run the emulator...

It's a recipe for unplayability !

Quote from ORION :

Havent you noticed those latest news that it is already possible to run windows on macs? Maybe this will be made public soon (dont know all the details).

My IntelMac of choice is the MacBook Pro and since the graphic card drivers does not work (yet) so at this stage, it is not a working solution.

Becky Rose: I only want to run XP for games that are not available for Macs (LFS, rFactor). The optimal solution would be Cedega for Mac OS X, that would leave me with just one OS...

Running emulators does not really work unless they do real system calls (like Rosetta and Cedega), VirtualPC does not do that (at least not in it´s current state)

Dual-coding for Windows and Intel based Macs are not such a chore anymore if you read what is being posted in the developer forums. I think that porting games to Intel Mac OS X is going to b much easier than anytime before! It´s looking good for Mac gamers...

Speaking as a serious mac user my thought is - why bother ??
I keep a gaming computer for LFS et al and use the mac for real work.

If you can run it on a PC & must use your mac then try remote desktop, at least you;ll get some cool screenshots

Your best bet is probably experimenting with a dual boot intel mac but mac's really aren't setup for gaming.



Unix for stability, OSX for productivity, Windoze for solitaire !!

Quote from Racer X NZ :

Unix for stability, OSX for productivity, Windoze for solitaire !!

tee-hee ..

Christ on a hoverbike, how come every damn discussion about operating systems becomes a battle of will who can come up with the lamest "my OS is better than yours" -punchline? Here's one: THEY ALL SUCK!

End of thread. Peace!

Sorry, but I will not let this thread die (until a moderator tells me to) just because it gets a visit from a troll or two. There are at least a few persons (me included) who really wants to run LFS on Mac OS X. Our reasons are ours and noone elses thankyouverymuch.

I´ll post again when I have any news regarding hte subject, I hope that others will too!

Quote from Becky Rose :

The problem for C++ coders (and I am assuming LFS is coded in C++) working on the PC is if they use a library which has no Mac equivellent then whatever library they used has to be totally replaced with something new on the Mac.

It seems LFS does not contain any 3rd party libraries except Microsoft ones. I may be wrong of course as I don't have the source code, but if we assume that is the case, then the only thing that needs to be provided for Mac is implementation of Win32/DirectX APIs.

One such implementation is provided by the Wine project. It is LGPL licenced, so it may be linked with closed-source product just like other LGPL libraries (SDL, OpenAL etc). LFS works quite well with Wine's DX implementation. There are still some issues with shaders due to differences in color format between DX and OpenGL shader model (BGRA versus RGBA), but having the source to both LFS and Wine's DirectX these issues may be quickly solved. In such case you don't need to fix Wine's shader to make it work for all cases, you just need to fix it for LFS, or tweak LFS shader code to make it work.

Another implementation is Transgaming's Cedega. Their DirectX implementation is under AFPL, so can't be used in LFS directly. Hovewer, if the demand for LFS on Mac is high enough, it may be profitable to contact Transgaming and do a port with them. LFS will gain marked share, and Transgaming will have one more title working perfectly on Cedega

To sum things up, Mac port of LFS may be easier than it seems. It all depends on how well LFS is written. It there are lots of endianess problems or big hairy asm blocks, it will be harder. But it is still far from rewriting the whole game, or ripping out the rendering engine and replacing with OpenGL one, as some people suggest is similar threads.

like dvorak hinted, next macOS version, will probably run windows apps directly.

Here's an article from Macworld magazine, http://www.macworld.com/2006/03/firstlooks/xpmini/index.php, the author has installed WinXP onto the new Intel Mac Mini. According to the article, getting a display driver is the only problem if you want to run Windows graphics in accelerated mode. But I've heard display drivers are already can be found in Internet.

Cheers,
DDmak

Quote from ThunderBoy :

Hi.

Just wondering if anyone tried to run LFS with VirtualPC on an MacOS X system? Or any other PC emulating software that I am aware of? I know there are Linux users doing it so it would be interesting to see how it fared on the new Intel-based Macs...

And before you start asking why when it works so well on PC (which it does), the reasons for moving (back) to MacOS are my own and noone elses thankyouverymuch

Being a programmer, I am also a bit curious as to the hassle of porting LFS to Macs. There are lots of interesting talk about porting PC games to Intel-based Macs and based on the little knowledge I have on how LFS is architected it seems like an excellent candidate for porting. The amount of good racing sims/games on Macs are fewer than few...

I've seen drivers for the Mac Mini so far, but not the iMac.

The situation with Windows on a Mac has just totally, utterly and dramatically changed. Currently it's only Beta - but Apple are now officially producing Windows drivers for Mac hardware.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303572

Provided you install Windows XP Service Pack 2 and dont use a wireless keyboard & mouse, your laughing all the way to the race track...

A better link, http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/

yep. bootcamp. no need for ports. lfs on mac is now (officially ).