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Applications / Re: OS/2 - Graphic User Interface - Desktop - Personal Experiences ?
« on: March 05, 2026, 04:50:09 am »I haven't seen anything about anyone running ArcaOS 5.1 virtually on a Mac but I will look for that or maybe someone is doing it with UNIX/Linux and maybe I can do it that way in the future. But I would MUCH rather work with people in any way that I can to help create a 64-bit version of OS/2 which can run everything the 32-bit version can run PLUS run native 64-bit OS/2 apps too. (The odds that Microsoft would agree to let us run 32-bit/64-bit Windows apps on OS/2 is close to negative one billion or lower but who knows, anything is possible.)
You can't run ArcaOS, or any X86 OS, virtually on a newer Mac, different CPU architecture and virtual means mostly using the hosts CPU. You have to emulate it and there are people running ArcaOS in Dosbox-X of all things. QEMU can also do the job. Someone did at point boot ArcaOS 5.1 on real hardware on an Intel Mac.
As for a 64 bit OS/2, the CPU architecture does not allow mixing 16 bit and 64 bit code, and our kernel is largely 16 bit along with things like device drivers at the low level and still some of the API.
So need a new kernel, device drivers, some API updated, even cmd.exe is 16 bit. And even then old 1.x software would not run, same with DOS and Win16. A huge job.
