Quickdraw vs Quartz?

About SheepShaver, a PPC Mac emulator for Windows, MacOS X, and Linux that can run System 7.5.3 to MacOS 9.0.4.

Moderators: Cat_7, Ronald P. Regensburg, ClockWise

Post Reply
iSynic
Space Cadet
Posts: 1
Joined: Sun Feb 10, 2008 5:17 am

Quickdraw vs Quartz?

Post by iSynic »

I've been looking and it appears that Sheepshaver still uses Quickdraw. Are there any real drawbacks to that vs. Quartz or what are the implications?
User avatar
Cat_7
Expert User
Posts: 6145
Joined: Fri Feb 13, 2004 8:59 am
Location: Sittard, The Netherlands

Post by Cat_7 »

SheepShaver emulates a mac to allow OS 9 to be run. OS 9 doesn't support Quartz. It seems for OSX Quartz (and Quartz Extreme) is a way to offload screen handling to the graphics processor on your video card. And there is another bottle neck: SheepShaver needs to emulate a video card for OS 9. But it also tries to offload some processing to the host machine. It does this with the help of the SDL libraries to get some compatibility between the different host systems it can run on.

So, to make a longish story short: OS 9 only has Quickdraw available, and some of it's operations are accelerated by offloading to the host. Quartz is only available on OSX.

Best,
Cat_7
Post Reply