@ruben
This was probably asked before, but is it out of the question to do a PPC emulator for x86, and allow OS4 to be run the same way OS3 is run with Amithlon?
Yes, this has been raised before, ever since Amithlon was first released as it happens. The short answer is no, it's not going to happen because it's not viable. The reasons are technical, financial and probably political too. Careful scrutiny of the Amithlon mailing list will probably reveal a number of threads on this subject and Bernie's assessment of the situation.
@ne_one
I've seen this mentioned a number of times so I'm now curious: how exactly can you create x86-native versions of Amiga applications? Or am I misreading the claims of programs like fxPaint?
No, you're not misreading them. AFAIK, IOspirit are the only company so far to take advantage of this feature in commercial applications (fxScan and fxPaint). Then again, there haven't been that many commercial AmigaOS applications released in the last 12 months anyway - I guess everyone is waiting for AOS4.
Amithlon can run x86 ELF binaries. This is technically one of the nicest parts of Amithlon, because it works really well. There are basically two ways of doing this:
(a) you can produce code on Linux and then compile it to an x86 ELF object, then use a 68k AmigaOS program to call the x86 functions. Examples of how this is done are on the CD, including all needed headers etc. This is also how MagicMenu added Amithlon support in v2.34.
(b) you can use the GCC cross compiler in x86 Linux (by Martin Blom) or in 68k AmigaOS (Jens Langner) to compile the programs to x86 code rather than 68k code. Endian issues are handled automatically. To run these, you either supply the program name as an argument to a loader program called run_elf, or better still, use run_elf to patch the system so that the x86 programs are run transparently. You can make calls from the x86 program to 68k library functions as normal. I've been able to recompile some simple examples of 68k code from the RKMs to x86 without changing anything at all, and then ran them successfully.
Basically, if your code compiles with GCC, it's not a tricky task. If it's SAS/C or DICE etc, then it needs to be converted to compile with GCC first, which can be messy.
DISCLAIMER: I've
REALLY oversimplified what happens above, but I don't think this forum is the best place for details. There's an Amithlon developer list at
this URL which, although extremely quiet lately, would be the best place for such questions. Suffice to say that "yes, Amithlon does run x86 code transparently from AmigaOS".