MacOSXPhiles

Last October, Maui X-Stream Inc. burst onto the scene, a completely unknown company in the Mac sphere, and claimed to have developed, from scratch, a PowerPC emulator called CherryOS that would allow people to run Mac OS X on x86 architecture at up to 80% of the x86 machines’ capabilities. They were also claiming that it was just days away from release, that a trial version would be available for download, and that it would be available for purchase at the blue-lite special price of just $49. But nothing came except for excuses as to why it wasn’t available, and the ability to order CherryOS from their website quickly became the option to pre-order it.

I’ll admit that when I first heard about CherryOS, I was not familiar with the technical challenges of emulating PowerPC architecture, and was definitely interested in buying it, should their claims be true. At the time, I was playing around with some different flavors of Linux designed for PowerPC, and thought it would be great to be able to do the same with OS X on the Athlon64 system that I had built to run Linux.

Well, as it turns out, the claims being made by MXS appear to be completely false. Drunken Blog has written a fantastic piece on what could be one of the biggest frauds the GPL community has ever seen, and has a body of evidence to prove it. I’m not going to regurgitate the details, but it appears that CherryOS is nothing but a rip-off of the open-source project PearPC, which is presently the only available emulator for running Mac OS X on x86 hardware, and does so at speeds comparable to watching paint dry. That said though, the work that PearPC has done in emulating the PowerPC is excellent, given the inherent technical deficiencies of the x86 platform.

And given the mounting evidence against CherryOS as nothing but a repackaging of others hard work, people need to be aware that the claims being made by MXS are, in fact, completely untrue. I shudder to think just how many people have already forked over their $49 to these guys, only to find out that they could have downloaded PearPC for free. And on top of that, how many people are going to go out and buy a copy of Mac OS X now that they think they can run it on their PC? So that could add an additional $129 onto the price they’ll pay for being deceived by these jokers, which is only going to add insult to injury. They will not be able to return their copy of OS X, not to mention that it’s a violation of Apple’s EULA to run OS X on anything buy Apple hardware, and I have a feeling that they’re going to be pretty pissed off about it. I know I would be.

Anyway, I highly suggest reading Drunken Blog’s expose on the true nature of CherryOS, and help spread the word that CherryOS is nothing but a load of BS. I have a feeling that in the not-to-distant future, CherryOS will suddenly become unavailable, and according to Drunken Blog, they’ve already made modifications to the trial version available for download. I have a copy of the trial that I downloaded yesterday, and will try make it available to those that have later versions than what is currently available.

Edit: Here is the version that I downloaded early a.m. on 03/12, if anyone wishes to track changes that they may be making. This file is hosted on my iDisk, and because the URL automatically logs you in to my iDisk public folder, your browser may give you a warning.

Filed under: Reviews, Software, Rants

Leave a Reply