The world according to...
Nathan Oates
 
 
 

Thu, 12 Jan 2006

Universal apps
With the release of the first Intel-based Macs yesterday, I've had to begin thinking about whether MacTF and my other apps will work nicely on an x86 system. The answer is that I just don't know, and as I'm not looking for an iMac or a 15" laptop, I'll have to wait until an iBook equivalent or a Mac mini is released so I can test it out myself. Before then, if anyone tries them under Rosetta, I would appreciate a note saying if they worked or not.

Some possible problems I could envisage:

  • Byte-swapping could cause data problems. The data coming from the Toppy USB port is all backwards (little-Endian) and I swap it back to normal before using it. I think this should be OK, as when I write out data to files (or read it in to upload), the file-system should deal with any conversion. But it may not, so files might turn out to be all garbled.
  • Divide-by-zeros - I was surprised to learn that on PPC "x/0 = 0", but on x86 "x/0 = CRASH!". I'm not sure if I ever do a divide-by-zero anywhere, but it's possible I haven't checked for it somewhere, so this could cause problems (but is pretty simple to fix and should be easy to see in a crash log).
  • Anything else I haven't thought about.
I'll probably flick the switch over at some point and make MacTF-EPG universal, but if I do so for MacTF I will lose 10.2 support as far as I know. I'm not sure if anyone is still using 10.2, but I'd like to keep it as long as possible. I'll get someone who owns an Intel-based Mac to beta-test if they want.


     
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