[Wine] Re: DOS programs on OSX?

SpawnHappyJake wineforum-user at winehq.org
Tue Aug 30 15:26:33 CDT 2011


Please do not think that WINE and VirtualBox are similar. VirtualBox emulates a whole new machine, giving you a computer inside a computer. It emulates a hardware platform, BIOS (or EFI), and runs an operating system on that. Any program running in a virtual machine is not seen by the host OS.
WINE doesn't do any of that. In fact, it doesn't run Windows programs. It translates Windows programs on the fly so that the operating system (Linux, Mac OS X, etc.) can run Windows programs. No second operating system, and no load of emulating hardware. And no load of analyzing everything spit out of a second operating system being ran on emulated hardware, which must be done to know what to screen out and what to pass on to real hardware and what to respond with.
A program ran through WINE will show up in the operating system's process list. A program ran in a virtual machine will not show up in the host's process list.
But both can be a means of running Windows programs. One's just way more efficient.







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