Thorsten,

Thanks for the info but I hope you did not misunderstand my note:  I did not
say it was POV-Ray's problem, I simply said it was not an Intel app.  I do
realize that Rosetta is not a very robust environment and it is no wonder
that it fails with POV-Ray.

That said, the very fact that Rosetta is not acceptable is the very reason
why POV-Ray needs to be ported to run as an Intel Mac app.  I think it is
much more likely that POV-Ray can be ported than expecting Apple to fix
Rosetta.  Rosetta, while it does work for most old applications, was never
meant to be a long lived solution for old PPC software.

Like I said in my previous post: if the POV-Ray team would like some help
with porting POV-Ray to the Intel Mac then let me know.  Every app I've
ever written for PPC Macs have ported easily over to Intel.

-Allan


Thorsten Froehlich <tho### [at] trfde> wrote:
> Allan wrote:
> > I just tried POV-Ray 3.6 on an Intel iMac and I get the same crash.  (It
> > works great on the "old" G5.)  A look at the crash log shows that the crash
> > happens in LaunchCFMApp.  It would appear that POV-Ray 3.6 is not yet ready
> > for the Intel Macs?  It should run on the Intels under Rosetta but maybe
> > the old Mac CFM (Code Fragment Manager, kind of like DLL's in Windows)
> > doesn't work under Rosetta?
> >
> No, the problem are the countless bugs in Apple's software emulator. If the
> PowerPC emulator is crashing, that is *Apple's* problem, not POV-Ray's.
> Report problems with crashes to Apple. POV-Ray is a perfectly working and
> cleanly written PowerPC application, and it does run on every real PowerPC
> processor. On the other hand, the emulator Apple supplies is known to have
> problems, and they won't get fixed unless Apple is told they exist.
>
> Report it to Apple, or nothing will change. Unlike with the much better
> planned 68K to PowerPC transition, Apple has neglected to develop a working
> debugger for the PowerPC emulation environment called "Rosetta" and instead
> rushed out unstable systems to end users. Even today there is no reasonable
> way to debug within Rosetta, except using a barely working hack documented
> by Apple to use an unreliable low-level command-line-based debugger with
> plenty of restrictions.
>
> BTW, effectively the poor development environments available, and the rushed
> transition is also the reason why major software vendors (i.e. Adobe) have
> been unable to deliver native software yet. There is just no way to properly
> develop and test on the x86 PCs sold by Apple yet.
>
> As for POV-Ray, do not expect a native version earlier than 2008 or as part
> of POV-Ray 4.0, whichever comes first. In the meantime, you can always
> compile and run the Unix version natively on Mac OS X.
>
>  Thorsten, POV-Team

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