Microsoft Windows Applications For Os X Mac OS Reacts To

Microsoft Windows Applications For Os X Mac OS Reacts To

Now, with Leopard released, new information about how the Mac OS reacts to Windows executable has come to light.

The first, a thread on the Wine mailing labeled Interesting Behavior of OS X, has Steven Edwards describing that Leopard has an undocumented loader for Portable Executables, which are used in 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows.

Of the various observations, the most important one is that Leopard will actually try to find required Windows DLL files, when attempting to load a Windows binary.

The second reports rcetc blog and describes a peculiar warning dialogue that appears when trying to open one of the default applications, which comes with Darwine.

For some reason, Apple feels the need to clearly inform the user that they are attempting to run a Windows application, something that it has never done before.

Apart from the strategic sense of such a move and the very real risk of stifling all native development for the platform, the issue of technical complexity is the most important one.

Many other projects have been trying to accomplish this feature for many years, with only limited success.

While Apple would certainly be better suited, this would be a massive undertaking, and then there would be all the containment issues related to things, such as viruses and malware that OS X would have to deal with.

This would mean that games could run on OS X with minimal tweaking, rather than with a serious conversion form Direct X to OpenGL.

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