Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 29th Nov 2007 21:22 UTC, submitted by Steven Edwards
On the Wine mailing list, there is some interesting information on Leopard's apparent ability to load basic Windows binaries. "When tracking down a crash in the kernel32 loader test, Dmitry found a bug in the Mac OS loader when Wine tried to load his dummy PE file. Upon further research I found that the Mac loader seems to have its own undocumented PE loader built in. I did some further testing with a Windows binary and got some really interesting results." The first thought was that this was a remnant from Mac OS X' EFI support, but upon further investigation, this really seems like new, Leopard-specific behaviour: "This is new to Leopard. On Tiger, dlopen rejects PE files as expected. The Wine testing that Steven was originally trying to do would probably not crash on Tiger." Apparently, Apple is trying its best to hide this behaviour.
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Member since:
2006-06-21
What Apple has and the Wine team doesn't is complete access to the Windows XP API. The 1997 agreement between Apple and Microsoft (which ran until 2002) covered cross-licensing technology between the two companies. Windows XP shipped in 2001.
I'll let Robert Cringely explain the rest:
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2006/pulpit_20060420_000893.html
So it's not a question of whether Apple can do this, it's whether they'd have enough reasons to do it.