Ok, this is proof that I’m a geek… We’re looking at Windows emulation software here, for a number of reasons. Most importantly, it’s a way of making our website testing more portable.
If you’ve done web design, you know that things tend to look different depending on what platform you’re on and what browser you’re using. At work, we’ve got both Macs and PC’s to make it easy to test things out. We can just move over to a handy PC when needed. Thing is you can’t easily do that when you’re working from home on a laptop… Fortunately, with a good emulator, you can just launch a program that pretends to be a Windows machine and look at it that way.
Thing is, the market for Windows emulators has gotten kind of sparse lately. SoftWindows and RealPC have become vaporware, and VirtualPC was bought up by Microsoft who still haven’t solved the problem that keeps it from running on a G5 machine. Fortunately, Mac OS X is a type of unix, so it can use a lot of stuff developed in the open source world…
There are two big ways to get Windows programs up and running under unix. One is a program called Wine. The other is an emulator called Bochs. The trouble with the first one is that it doesn’t actually emulate a processor, it just creates an environment on an x86 based unix machine where windows programs can run.
Fortunately, Bochs seems to be doing the trick. I’ve gotten it up and running with the included Linux and FreeDOS disc images, and I’m working on installing one of our old copies of Windows 2000. And that’s when I realized that I could do something incredibly sick and wrong…
Y’see, Apple’s Darwin operating system was ported over to run on the Intel chipset a long time ago… And they just released a bootable CD image of the OS too… So I could use Bochs under OS X to emulate a PC and install the PC version of OS X…