WinMac information.

What is
WinMac?

WinMac is an emulator that will allow Macintosh programs to run on windows. WinMac presents Mac programs with a Windows look and feel.

There are two parts to WinMac.

  1. A Dynamic Link library for Windows that will allow Mac programs to be compiled and run as native Windows programs. The Library provides many Mac Toolbox functions and should allow compilation of most Mac programs with little change to the program source.
  2. An emulator to run Mac binaries. The emulator uses the WinMac library to run Macintosh binaries on Windows. 
Current
Status		 Many, Many ideas and some code. Enough of the toolbox is written to allow (very) simple Mac programs to compile and run as Windows apps. There are still huge portions completely missing. I have also been working of a 68040 emulator for the initial release of the binary emulator however I may stop development on that and start work on a PPC one. The processor emulation uses dynamic recompilation to improve speed.
 
How will
WinMac
Work		 Emulation's can be broadly grouped into a couple of categories.
  1. System/Hardware level emulation's.
    These emulators (such as Win64) try to completely mimic the hardware of the emulated system. System/Hardware emulation's provide the best degree of compatibility but take a big performance hits. These emulators will run the actual ROM code of the target system. System/Hardware emulation's will run programs that interact with the hardware at it's lowest level.
  2. Operating System level emulation's.
    OS emulation's work well where programs treat the computer like a black box. For example, imagine that a program needs to create a window, the program doesn't care it's done all it cares is that if it asks for one it gets one. This is how an OS emulation works, by providing emulation of the processor and Operating system. OS level emulation's have a couple of big advantages over system/hardware level emulation's. Firstly because much of the code is native code the emulation is much faster. And secondly ( and mostly importantly in the case of WinMac ) you do not require any ROM code from the emulated system.

WinMac is an OS level emulation 

There are many similarities between the Windows API and the Macintosh Toolbox. WinMac takes Windows objects and presents them to Mac programs as ToolBox objects. When a Macintosh program creates a graphics port it ends up with a Windows device context. All calls made are then translated to their corresponding Windows Call or Calls.

Expected
Release
Date		 Never!   Sadly WinMac has been shelved indefinitely.   Maybe one day I'll revisit it, but who knows when.
A small
demo		 MacFile : Everyone always wants to download something, and you won't go away empty handed here. This program uses the WinMac resource manager components to load and examine Macintosh binaries ( in Mac binary format). As it does very little checking on file type, opening any file other that a Mac binary file will likely crash the program.
Email me Ralph Mason
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