So have you been following all this CherryOS goofiness over the course of the past couple of weeks? We haven't mentioned it here before this, in part because we'd already incorporated the "Mac emulator running on Windows" plotline once last spring, and we figured that recycling a plot that soon would be tacky. But what we were really waiting for was some real and credible testimony about whether CherryOS is legit in its lofty claims of emulating a Mac at 80 percent of the hardware's native Wintel speed-- and boy, are we glad we waited, because what we got instead was a veritable treasure trove of drama and intrigue that could melt the tusks off a walrus at twenty paces. You gotta love it when the players write the play for you, too...

Just to bring you up to speed, a few weeks ago, some company calling itself Maui X-Stream officially announced CherryOS, what it claimed was a $50 application that could let Wintel boxes run Mac OS X in emulation as a process within Windows at roughly 80 percent of "normal" speeds. Furthermore, the company said it was working on a version that could boot an x86 box without any additional operating system, meaning you'd eventually be able to buy a cheap Wintel clone, install a $50 copy of CherryOS and a $129 copy of Mac OS X, and bickety-bam: you'd have the crappiest, ugliest Mac you've ever laid eyes on. But it'd be cheap, dagnabbit, and that's all some people care about.

But is CherryOS all it's cracked up to be? Not if you believe the buzz which insists that it's nothing but a hoax. We've yet to hear from anyone who's successfully gotten CherryOS running any version of Mac OS X on any Wintel setup, mostly because no one's even managed to download the product; while it was supposedly downloadable as a 1.0 release, now it's described as "a beta release for selected users"-- and the site's down even as we write this. Mac OS Rumors claims to have spoken with five people who have the beta, and none of them (including a hotshot developer at Apple) was able to get it working with any version of Mac OS X on any Wintel setup.

And it just gets worse (or better, depending on your perspective): faithful viewer Mark Whybird notes a WIRED article in which a systems engineer at the University of Wisconsin poked through the CherryOS beta and discovered that it's apparently little more than a repackaging of PearPC, the cool but dog-slow open source Mac emulator that we told you about the last time we used the "Mac emulator running on Windows" plot (and which can even be used to get Mac OS X running on an Xbox, albeit at speeds that make snails tap their watches and sigh pointedly in exasperation).

PearPC developers have publicly claimed that there's plenty of PearPC code in CherryOS, which is easily noticeable by a quick examination of variable names, which are, in many places, completely identical. Interestingly, CherryOS's single developer, Arben Kryeziu, denies having used any PearPC code whatsoever, and claims that "there are some functionalities that can only be done a certain way. Names are going to be similar or identical because there are only certain ways to do things." Fair enough-- except that one of the variable names found in both PearPC and CherryOS is "SPIRO MULTIMAX 3000," a nonsense term that PearPC's lead programmer made up. It's hard to imagine how Arben could have come up with that identical variable name all on his lonesome.

Still, Arben insists that the product is legit and that it's 100 percent free of any and all PearPC code, and he claims that he'll prove it by showing his source code to the PearPC developers "when the first public release is ready" in a few days' time. Personally, at this point we think that's probably about as likely to happen as invading alien forces changing the oil in our car, but hey, we're always happy for a chance to have our faith in humanity restored. Not that those chances ever come through, mind you, but it's the thought that counts, you know?