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A comment on The strange case of virtual machines on telephones. Parent comment

Re:The strange case of virtual machines on telephones by vetinari on Thursday August 26, 2010 @05:19PM (#1637195)
It is actually a problem on Macs: there are entire libraries of applications, that will never run on any new Mac. PPC/Classic is not supported, PPC/OSX may or may not run, depending on the app. Forget 68K/Classic.

(Yeah, I should have bought PC versions of Lucasfilm games, not the Mac ones.)

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Re:The strange case of virtual machines on telephones by wmf on Thursday August 26, 2010 @05:31PM (#1637220)
Unofficial but works: http://www.macwindows.com/OS9_on_Intel_Mac.html
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Re:The strange case of virtual machines on telephones by jsnell on Friday August 27, 2010 @04:37AM (#1638291)
You can't run them on ScummVM?
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Re:The strange case of virtual machines on telephones by rbanffy on Friday August 27, 2010 @09:26AM (#1638733)
And you just made the point for why use VMs ;-)

Wouldn't it be nice to have a ScummVM that can run not only games but real applications?

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Re:The strange case of virtual machines on telephones by vetinari on Friday August 27, 2010 @07:01AM (#1638463)
Yes, in this case, that's exactly what I do.

But the point is that I shouldn't rely on group of volunteers to preserve compatibility. For Lucasfilm games it works, for others it doesn't (other "classic game", Diablo II, has PPC/Classic installer and PPC/Carbon update. It is uninstallable on current Macs). It is not just about games either - how many people were satisfied with Photoshop 7 (PPC/Classic), but they had to purchase newer version just to be compatible with their platform? Specifically Apple had quite a lot of ABI breaks in their history.

But back to the article - it claimed, that architecture specific binaries are not a problem. I think, and many people agree, that having architecture independent binary is a good thing and provides real benefits not just to developers (fewer builds and reduced support), but to end-users too - compatibility with wide array of devices. You can develop for Snapdragon/Hummingbird (ARM) device and the same binary will run on Moorestown (IA32) or some random Freescale (PPC) too.

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