Win apps on Mac without Windows

DARWINE, an open source project, intends to port and develop WINE as well as other supporting tools that will allow Darwin and Mac OS X users to run Windows Applications. The project is described as being in pre-alpha stage, which means the project is in its early stages, far from working software.

WINE is software for PCs running Linux or FreeBSD Unix. WINE runs Windows applications without running Windows--the Windows apps appear directly in a Unix windowing environment. Rather an emulating a PC, WINE (which requires Intel hardware) provides the Windows APIs for the apps. This means on PC hardware, it can run faster than an emulator such as Virtual PC.

DARWINE will also run on a PC running Darwin, Apple's open source Mac OS X core based on FreeBSD. To run on a Mac and Mac OS X, DARWINE will need an x86 emulator. The DARWINE project is working on integrating an emulator, such as Bochs, but has not gotten that far yet. However, even with an emulator, a DARWINE for Mac OS X could run faster than Virtual PC due to the absence of Windows itself. (MacWindows reports)

We hope to see a product faster and easier to use than VirtualPC.