Found this last night and thought it was something worth posting.http://www.apple.com/games/articles/2001/07/destineer/ I know that Apple does have some Microsoft titles already running on their platforms and not just through an emulator. If they can get FS2002 to run half as good on their system as it now does on a PC, I think it will be time to say goodby to Windows.Terry

What about for those of us who wish FS2002 worked twice as well on the PC? :D :D

I like the idea that a Microsoft program would most likely run better on a Apple (Unix) based system if given the chance. Would the shame drive the Microsoft folks into trying to make their code better? Problably not, but one can only dream. Besides, competiion is "Supose" to "Improve" a product.Terry

"Powerful you have become Bill....the dark side I sense in you" :-luke

Im waiting for somebody to tell me MSFS will run native on a linuxbox. At that point, Im dumping windoze forever.Eric

Why would recompiling exactly the same code to work under OS-X cause it to "run better"? I've heard Apple chant out before how "simply recompiling" a program will get it to run on OS X but simply doesn't really mean much here. It also wouldn't improve the product because it would be the same product...? I doubt it would run any better because unless it was completely re-written - again a different product - then it would use the same computing power. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, as my Dad says.I can understand your saying this if you're running 98 or Me but not if you're running 2K or XP. I have run it on both of the latter and it does not crash. Period. And running half as well as on a PC would have me dropping it like a stone. As for other MS titles running on Mac, if you're talking about Office then that's not a port AFAIK, it's a complete re-design. Personally, even if I did loathe Microsoft as much as I did when I was a student and trying to achieve something with Linux, I'd not go out and waste an awful lot of money on a Mac just to put one in the eye of Redmond, especially when Linux will run on Intel and indeed PowerMac processors.Regarding OS X and UNIX, I have a good friend who works in computer-human interaction. For years he was a Mac fanatic, refusing to touch Windows with a bargepole. Then he was forced to use a PC at work and now runs 2 machines at home with Win 2K, as well as MacOS 9 on his iMac.I asked him what he thought of OS X. He said he hates it. He makes a living of user interfaces, so I take what he says seriously. He didn't much like it when it was NextStep and doesn't like it now. He's not alone by any means. A lot of people I've talked to say the navigation is awful. Unlike XP, it appears to have been designed to look nice first and answer questions later. I don't know how serious a threat Microsoft believes Linux is - I know they weren't too bothered about it a few years ago - but if I was Bill Gates, the last thing I'd want is one of my major successes being ported to an OS which at web server-level takes the lion's share of the market, is free, more stable and more secure than its own offerings. I may well be wrong, but if it worked on Unix it would work on Linux. One of these days I might even try to run it using Wine [Wine Is Not An Emulator] under Linux, just for a laugh. I'd be interested to hear if anyone's tried it :)Best regards//Neil

This might be really cool......I could run the program on my TiBook while I travel...Cool! :-kewl [br][br][div align=center]http://members.cox.net/joshieca/fstimeslink.gif][br

Um... For those of you who obviously aren't computer programmers...You can't just simply "recompile" a program written specifically for one platform to work on a different platform. It just doesn't work that way. You have to "port" the code to the other platform. That usually involves significant code rewrite. The more disimiliar the platforms are, the more the code you will have to change. In many cases, a port is not even possible. The code would have to be completely rewritten from the ground up.The exception to this would be relatively simple programs programmed in ANSI C which, in theory, should be easy to port, and also when moving programs from one Unix/Linux flavor to another Unix/Linux flavor.There's no way you could take the source code for FS2002 and recompile it for the Mac OS X. FS2002 makes use of the Microsoft DirectX libraries for graphics, sound, and control input (and probably for multiplayer capabilities, too.) Mac OS X doesn't even have DirectX (unless I am mistaken) so you'd have to (at the bare minimum) completely rewrite everything that involves rendering graphics, generating sound, and reading input devices. That in itself would require a team of programmers working for many months to rewrite something of the magnitude of FS2002. In short, if it was easy to "recompile" everything to any platform, you'd see a lot more stuff available for other platforms. But what about X-Plane? One of the reasons that X-Plane is cross-platform (Windows and Mac) is because Austin (the author) obviously put some thought into making sure his code was written in such a way as to be easily transportable. All his graphics are rendered using OpenGL, which happens to be a cross-platform graphics library. Note that X-Plane doesn't have a Windows interface. Those aren't Windows menus and windows buttons. Instead, he made up his own user interface. If he had used the Windows libaries to generate the UI, his program would not have been nearly as portable as it is today. He'd have to rewrite huge chunks of code to handle the UI for each of the platforms.I could go into more detail on this if somebody wants, but I gather I've probably bored most of ya! ;)

Lindows As featured at WalMart.:-eek

To everyone that responded,Thanks,The way I read the press release, the program was going to have it's code re-written completely and not just compiled.I guess I was hoping that someone "Apple" in this case would be able to make a Fluid Simulation available to a basic desktop system. If I run FS2000 or older on my AMD 1800 XP + machine, they seem to do well. Running FS2002 really brings this system down to it's knees even when the sliders are not maxed. I have a Gf3 Ti-500 video card with the latest Nvidea 29 series drivers, Windows XP Home OS, and 768 Mb of PC2100 DDR memory. Flying anything faster than the Cessna 182 seems to overtax the FS2002 program to run without the dreaded stutters. I lock the frame rates at or below 30FPS.Maybe I am looking for too much in a $70 program. Twenty years ago when I worked on Air Force flight sims (F4-E and F-111D), visual systems were just coming out of the "Model Board" era in into the first generation of CGI (computer generated images). Even though the scenery looked very much like a cartoon, at least it was "Smooth". That smoothness made up for the lack of detail. Now that we can model in tons of detail, should we not be able to also write the code so that it can be displayed relisticly (smoothly)?Again many thanks for the responses and technical info.Terry