On 25 Nov 2005 at 13:42, Johannes Gebauer wrote: > (BTW, I sort of doubt that the kind of Audio software I am talking > about will run happily on a MacIntel machine with dual boot or Virtual > PC. In fact I have my doubts as far as Finale is concerned, too. As > far as I can tell Apple has to do very little to completely destroy > subsystem support for Windows apps on their Intel machines. We may be > able to run Word or the like quite happily, but when it gets to Audio > and MIDI support I am not so sure.
I don't see why. If you're emulating the API you've got to do all of it. I would think it would be much harder to suppport hardware on a PPC motherboard than it would be on an Intel motherboard. It will be interesting to see what Apple uses for a BIOS on these machines. Maybe Apple will finally break the backward-compatibility issues and introduce a new BIOS. That alone would prohibit running Windows, while also probably giving proprietary advantage to Apple's software and hardware. But that's unlikely. Right now, PCI cards are compatible with both platforms. I don't know about graphics cards, which are now usually something beyond PCI (AGP and so forth). But if it's an Intel-based motherboard, the interfaces to the devices installed on it (whether on-board or in expansion slots) will be the *same* as for Wintel hardware, so that should make it *easier* to support hardware access, not harder. Indeed, it seems borderline miraculous to me that VirtualPC works at all in regard to any kind of hardware access. Obviously there's some form of hardware abstraction level running between the Mac OS and VirtualPC that takes care of translating calls from the Windows apps to the Windows API (and to the Windows hardware abstraction layer) into calls that the Mac hardware can respond to. That this is done at speeds that are not so slow as to make it unusable is pretty amazing, seems to me. With an Intel-based motherboard under the Mac OS, it seems to me that VirtualPC's hardware abstraction layer could be substantially simpler. Indeed, it might be possible to allow the VirtualPC session to talk to that hardware directly, without needing to go through the underlying Mac OS's hardware interfaces. Of course, that might not be advisable, as then there could be contention for hardware between the two OS's, something that would not be an issue with all calls going through the HAL of the underlying Mac OS. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
