Eitan Shefer writes " I have a nice scoop. hehe.. so far no news source picked this one up.. back in the old days, of the pre-Jobs-intrim-headed Apple, Apple invested in a new CPU company called Exponential, which claimed to have made very fast Power-pc based CPU (up to 500mhz At 0.6 micron, which is amazing, if true.). Apple, under Jobs decided not to use Exponential's chips, a decision which pretty much killed exponential since very few potential clients for PPC desktop CPUs existed at that time (or still do). Exponential also wrote a few patents that were rather interesting to other CPU makers (X86 emulation in 64bit architecture, for example, which Intel would be interested in.). Exponential died, and, in the end the patents were bought by S3. The same S3 today has announced that they have entered into a 10-year cross license deal with Intel, giving Intel (and S3) access to each other's patents. Click below to read the press release. "

A new book and some Slashdot e-mail makes it clear why people like me have to learn how to use Linux and help spread its message beyond the Rarefied Geek Enclave. And also just what a nightmare that's going to be.

Eivind Eklund wrote in to say FreeBSD 2.2.8 has been released. See the announcment here. Some of the important changes include support for IDE drives larger than 8GB, a 3c905B driver, Linux emulation support improvement, as well as all BugTraq advisories against 2.2.7.

Here is a summary of the Transmeta patent for those that do not have the time to read it fully. Click below to read more.

Justin Bradford writes "Corel announced on comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine that they plan to use WineLib (the library side of WINE, the open source Windows emulator) to port all of their products. Here's what Gavriel State (gavriels@corel.com), Linux porting team leader, had to say: "We are actively committing engineering resources to the Wine project. Once our exploration and evaluation has settled down a bit (read: we've cleaned up our hacks), we'll begin submitting patches to Alexandre to review and commit to the CVS tree. We'll be spending some effort on getting the WordPerfect Suite 8 applications running under Wine, but our primary focus will be on porting ou WordPerfect Suite 9 applications using WineLib. We'll also begin participating publicly on the WINE newsgroup and mailing lists, so that we can contribute our ideas as well as our code. You should be seeing a lot more of us in the future."" S: What is of particular interest to me is that they have already coded a Win32-on-MacOS library when they ported CorelDraw to the Mac. This means Corel has very valuable expertise in the Win32-emulation area.

Scott Guelich writes "People familiar with BeOS on PowerPC already know about SheepShaver. It uses the Mac ROMs to run the MacOS and Mac apps within a window on BeOS at full speed w/o emulation. According to their website, they've started developing a version for LinuxPPC too! "

Jim Huffman writes in with this technology question: "We develop software for an integrated communications box and are forever in need of faster more powerful processor chips. Unfortunately, the K6s and the P IIs and later have no apparent emulator support. Does anybody have any ideas on how to develop software efficiently, on these faster more powerful platforms without the the aid of a hardware emulator?"

Steve Sergeant wrote in with a piece on your data. He talks about formats, and how they seem to unnecessarily complicate matters. Personally I think the problem is fading as most vendors have a few universal formats that interchange, but each time a new version of each app comes out, it takes months for each competitor to include import filters for the new ones.

The september issue of SunWorld focuses on Perl with coverage of O'Reilly's Perl Conference 2.0 and Open Source Developer Day. Quite a lot of interesting reads there. Also in this month's issue is part 2 of "SPARCing up Linux", about SunOS emulation and running Linux on Ultra.

The Freedows OS team has split into 2 camps: Freedows and the Alliance. This feature article presents the view of the Alliance, and has been written by Alliance Ambassador Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr. We hope to have a response to it from Freedows Project Lead Reece K. Sellin tomorrow.

Ramon van Handel has written a summary of the Freedows project for everyone to read. He talks about what it is, where it is going, and tries to address some of the major concerns that folks have expressed about it.

Marc Siep writes "It would appear that the demise of Project Unreality has not meant the end of N64 emulation. Check out this out. Looks like emulation is going the open-source way, just look at the success of Snes9x (now available on DOS, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, MacOS, Solaris, SunOS, RiscOS, BeOS, Irix, HP-UX, AmigaOS and the N64 itself."

ISA is finally dead. Microsoft and Intel have been hinting as much in previous PC 9x drafts, so it comes as no surprise. The particularly interesting aspect to this is that it means older DOS games relying on ISA soundcards will be incompatible with future machines -- barring Microsoft's DOS box emulation. We can also expect future Microsoft OS' to give up supporting ISA hardware, obsoleting it. I hope Linux will not go down that path, since old hardware can be used by non-profit organisations, 3rd world countries and Universities (Beowolf clusters of 386's) Other requirements include a 300Mhz processor, a 56K modem, 256K L2, an AGP graphics card, in-built networking recommended and 32Mb of Ram for the home user. It'll be interesting to see how these requirements and the sub-1000$ phenomenon interact.

Leif Hardison wrote in to say that hardware.doa.org is is sponsoring a contest for the most inovative case designs. Peter Renshaw wrote in to tell us about the ICQ GNU Project which aims (surprise!) to produce an open source ICQ proggie. Mike Rust wrote in to tell us that SNES9x 1.0 for DOS been released. It supports transparency and SuperFX emulation and all kinds of neat stuff. Linux Port should be Coming. Joshua Fouts wrote in to plug The Online Journal is following the proceedings involving Kevin Mitnick's trial in detail. They also have an article about Chris Lamprecht. Both are pretty interesting. Lastly Michael Dillon sent us a link to an interesting article on 4 phases of Linux acceptance.

After yesterday's uber cool DigDug emulation article, Bedope has decided to run a contest challanging people to see how many layers deep they can emulate. The first people to get 5 and 6 get prizes. It's just a silly way to spend your weekend. The contest requires Be as one of the layers though, so perhaps we should have an alternate contest that doesn't have any OS limitations. Anyway, check out BeDope's Contest for details.

Jón Ragnarsson sent me something that isn't news, but I dig it. Apparently, someone used Be to emulate MacOS to Emulate Windows Emulating an Apple IIe. All those layers of emulation were brought together to play Dig Dug! It just doesn't get much cooler. Check out a screenhost or read the emulator here (which even has a Wallace and Grommit Pic!)

Ok, I'm warning everyone right up front that this is the sort of editorial that might raise a lot of eyebrows, and might start tempers going. Kevin Forge has written a piece on the Crusher App- an application that is superior to its rivals. Specifically, he talks about the Crusher App, and why Oracle is staying away from Linux. What Kevin suggests strikes me as quite possible, not necessarily with Oracle, but with other companies as well, and that's why I'm posting it. Its a major obstacle for Open Source to overcome. Read Kevin's bit, and let's hear what you have to say.

For those of you out of touch with the emulation scene, SNES9x was the coolest of the super nintendo emulators. It was getting fairly usable before the author got sick of being ripped off and quit a few months ago. According to Garrett and this page development will now continue, with open source distribution! This is kinda rare on emulation scene, but it is definately cool news.

In more Windows CE emulation news, a GameBoy emulator for WindowsCE has been released. The speed of this emulator is not known, other than on one or two WinCE boxes(?). The author encourages people to try it on theirs. I think this is an indictator the PalmPilot needs better hardware- just about the only thing it could emulate now is CP/M on a Z-80. The German magazine, Heise Verlag has areport on just such a thing

James Baughn sent us this link and this one to information about a project underway to convert win32 apps to native OS2 apps. No emulation, just flat out conversion.