Re: OS X Games
There _is_ a project underway to enable one to run OS X binaries under one of
the BSD's running on PowerPC. It was mentioned on Slashdot a while back.
However this project is just beginning and will probably take at least a couple
years before you could run many OS X applications.
OS X has a dramatically different API for user space applications than either
linux or BSD. For example it uses the Carbon API from C/C++ or Cocoa from
Objective C rather than X11.
User space access to I/O devices is quite different. You use something called
the IOKit whose API is based on Microsoft COM. There is support for Unix-style
device files for serial and disk I/O, but you still have to use the IOKit to
find the name of the special file in /dev because the device files are created
dynamically when the kernel discovers the hardware.
Carbon is a modification of the classic Mac OS API that is redesigned to be
suitable for a protected-memory operating system. Cocoa is based on the
NeXTStep application framework.
There is a project called GnuStep that will allow you to run many Cocoa
application under X11 in Linux, but it requires a recompile from sources.
(Note that the native compiler for Mac OS X is gcc. Objective C has been
compiled with gcc for many years. Next tried to avoid releasing the sources to
the objective c compiler but the Free Software Foundation wouldn't let them.)
--
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com/
crawford@goingware.com
Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.
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