There’s been a bit of excitement at the moment over a program for the PC called CherryOS. It claims to allow your PC to run Mac OS X, and indeed it does. Problem is that it appears to be a thinly disguised copy of PearPC, open source software under the GPL. As is increasingly the case, DrunkenBatman has an excellent summation of the proof, and I’d encourage you to check his site out if it’s not already in your bookmarks.

The CherryOS ‘people’ (it appears to be one guy masquerading as a company) have included the PearPC Altivec patch, which allows it to emulate a G4 processor rather than a G3. They claim this makes their software “3 times faster” than PearPC (which has not included this patch into their standard install, and therefore not benchmarked with it as yet), and therefore well worth the US$49.95 they’re asking for the software.

To demonstrate the performance you should expect from CherryOS, I took the liberty of comparing my 1.5Ghz G4 PowerBook results with CherryOS. The CherryOS PC is an AMD Athlon XP 3000 running at 2.16GHz, with 1Gb of RAM. Certainly not a slow machine.

Here are the results. Draw your own conclusions.

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