I’ve been playing around with PearPC today – it’s really cool. A lot of people on forums have been complaining about how slow it is. I didn’t find it too bad, especially considering it’s emulating an entirely different CPU arch.
I might actually stick with PCs after all. Now I’m looking in earnest to the new 90nm Athlon 64 socket 939 CPUs. I think I’ll upgrade next year to a machine that has good sound, PCI Express 16x and plenty of USB2, Firewire and SATAII.
So yeah PearPC rocks. I was able to get quite a functional OSX install going. There are a few issues though. The main one on Windows is that there is no networking with the host OS (as of 0.3.1). This really sucks. To get software into the hosted OSX I’d have to move the files into an ISO filesystem image, then change the config to mount the ISO with the virtual CDROM, then boot up.
On Linux you can use the tunnel adapter device for networking. I might try PearPC under Linux and see how that goes. Other issues include no sound, and the inability to connect to the physical CDROMS and DVD drives in my system. So it’d be great to get bridged networking, physical optical drive access and sound going. Hopefully these things are coming.