By: dON k. eITNER (freiheit@tstonramp.com)
http://www.tstonramp.com/~freiheit/
It was a dark and stormy night--well I'm sure it was stormy somewhere in the
world. Anyway, the date was March 9, 1998, and nearly seventy people crowded into
a small Internet Relay Chat channel to hear the words of a mystical converter which
would take in 32-bit Windows applications and return them as 32-bit OS/2 applications
for all to enjoy in a most stable computing environment.
The lights grew dim as the hosts and speakers for the evening took the stage.
Quickly the chatter of visitors was hushed by the channel going moderated. Then
the questioning began in earnest and all were enlightened. For this particular V.O.I.C.E.
SpeakUp session, five members of the Win32-OS/2 team were present to answer questions.
Sander van Leeuwen, Peter Fitzsimmons, Vince Vielhaber, Patrick Haller, and Timur
Tabi took two hours out of their busy schedules to answer the torrent of questions
our visitors had about their amazing product. The full log of this chat session
should be available at http://www.os2voice.org/logs/V030998.log
by the time you read this.
Win32-OS/2, the second of hopefully many good news items for OS/2 for this year,
was released recently as a pre-beta test with the ability to convert the Quake II
executables into native OS/2 executables and provide hardware GLide acceleration
on the 3dfx Voodoo graphics chipset (though the Voodoo is not required for a "Quake
II/2" windowed session). Several small Win32 (32-bit Windows) applications
also convert (Notepad, Reversi, a DirectDraw SDK sample, Freecell, etc) but most
other complex applications do not currently convert. This is being addressed and
each successive release of Win32-OS/2 will add more potential for any given Win32
application to convert into a native OS/2 one.
As many of you may already know, Win32-OS/2 uses and builds upon the IBM/Lotus
Open32 API (Application Programming Interface) which was used recently to port Lotus
SmartSuite to OS/2 as a fully native office suite. The goal, then, of the Win32-OS/2
project is to extend the power of Open32 by providing additional Win32 APIs to OS/2
(through supplemental libraries) and empower the end user to convert a pre-existing
Win32 applications (.exe and .dll files) into a native OS/2 application which runs
without the aid of WinOS/2 or any emulators, through the use of the pe2lx.exe program.
The method used by pe2lx is sound and apparently quite legal. It acts as little
more than an application loader, which is a part of every operating system, but
it then takes the loaded--into memory--Win32 application (a PE or Portable Executable)
and writes it back to disk in the OS/2 executable file format (LX or Linear eXecutable).
At this time, the Win32 application must be installed onto a Win95 or NT system
in order for the conversion to work (due to Windows registry entries and such) but
one future goal of the project may be to convert the standard Windows installer
so that a user can take a brand new, still in the box application and install it
onto their OS/2 system without ever having to hassle with Win95/NT. The team spoke
of the viability of porting winsock (internet) applications and multimedia players,
but that codecs (such as the QuickTime 3.0 codecs) may be more difficult based on
fundamental differences in the way OS/2 and Windows handle such codecs.
All in all, the Win32-OS/2 team realize the same thing IBM does--that OS/2's
future lies in business applications, but rather than relegating OS/2 to server
and nearly-dumb terminals, this project will attempt to allow business applications
of various levels and used throughout the business world (word processors, spreadsheets,
internet applications, etc) to be run natively under OS/2. Along they way, as proven
by the success in porting Quake II, they will invariably hit upon a home user oriented
application which converts, and they seem not at all opposed to this unlike IBM.
As OS/2 progresses farther into the SOHO market with these applications, it would
stand to reason that it will also gain additional home use and can continue to be
a very viable operating system for everyone. Of course truly native development
is preferred, and for that we as OS/2 users must continue to support our native
ISVs, but when your boss or your kids tell you that you have to run such-and-such
Win32 app/game, you will now be able to run it without compromising your integrity.