PCTask vs PCx vs Emplant e586 what is the best PeeCee emulator

[psxphill]

I think until 68k FPGAs get stronger you're still going to be out of luck for robust x86 emulation on the Amiga in pure software.

Someone could write a x86 JIT for 68k. Accurate VGA emulation will be a much harder problem to crack, although anything that just uses VESA framebuffer modes should be fine.

[psxphill]

Maybe I'm wrong, but I thought PCTask & PCx already do JIT.

I guess I didn't keep up to date. PC task 4 does (it doesn't seem to appear in the pc task 3 manual) and the commercial version of PCx does.

[psxphill]

Sure, pc emulation on a classic Amiga, or even "NG" options isn't an alternative to having a physical PC if one wishes to use an even moderately version of Windows, but there's a universe of cool, useful older software out there for dos and win9x.

A cheap modern bridgeboard, that could also run a 68k emulation and work as an accelerator would be pretty amazing. Even if it was only i3 or atom.

[psxphill]

But today we have Win10 and I doubt I could use that seriously with PCx - even on a Vampire, not to speak of an 68060@50mHz...

Windows 10 checks for PAE, NX & SSE2 before it will install. These came out after PCx, so unless they've been added recently then won't be able to use Windows 10 with PCx at all. Let alone seriously.

[psxphill]

I can't speak to various expansion manufacturers but I think a lot of the user-base back then was "Anything but x86", so by that logic PPC was "good" and x86 was "bad",

After commodore management (and to a certain extent the commodore engineers) had almost killed the Amiga's chances of being successful, the "Intel Outside" crowd came in and finished it off.

Hombre released in 1993 would have given the PS1 or Saturn a run for it's money, but by then Amiga had lost the price/performance war with PC's.

To take on the PC market they would need an x86 and an off the shelf graphics & sound chip with PCI slots, to differentiate they could have built a custom north/south bridge that abandoned PC architecture for something a bit more Amiga like. You could build backward compatibility for copper/blitter/paula etc registers in the chipset, leaving legacy applications running on a simple 68k emulator.

and what they didn't get was that Motorola's tradition of not supporting previous architectures and instruction sets in follow-on CPUs meant that the PPC was just as alien as an x86 system would have been.

Motorola licensed PPC in from IBM, so it was always going to be different to 68k.

[psxphill]

RISC is future, CISC is past and so on, not even any discussion about what is the better route.

RISC was the future. ARM has done really well and modern x86 chips effectively translate code into RISC.

PPC was just the wrong horse. Motorola could have spent money on doing a die shrink of the 68060 to push the clock speed faster, however Apple pushed Motorola into the PowerPC partnership with IBM. Motorola got the PowerPC cheap & I'm sure it seemed like a good move at the time.

Amiga was always about making the most of as little money being spent as possible.

[psxphill]

Motorola was approached by IBM to make the PPC.  Apple had nothing to do with it.

That isn't how everyone else remembers it.

Apple had been trying to use the 88100, IBM came in and sold them the idea of the POWER chip they had developed so Apple dropped the 88k which triggered Ford to drop it too. However Apple wanted IBM to have a second source & Motorola now had spare manufacturing capacity as their own 68k & 88k chip sales were heading towards zero.

http://lowendmac.com/2014/ibm-apple-risc-and-the-roots-of-the-powerpc/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC#Apple_and_Motorola_involvement

Motorola seem to not have been involved with PowerPC development itself, so it wouldn't surprise me if they had their own projects going on at the same time.

The Motorola project you wrote about sounds like Transmeta, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta_Crusoe, which means you weren't that far ahead of time.

[psxphill]

Like I said, Apple had nothing to do with Motorola's involvement with PPC, that was all IBM's doing.

I'm not sure why the new york times would lie.

http://www.nytimes.com/1994/09/14/business/business-technology-computing-s-bold-alliance-falters.html

"At least that was the strategy three summers ago when I.B.M. and Apple Computer stunned their industry by announcing a joint plan to attack the domination of the personal computer industry by machines based on Intel chips and Microsoft software. Apple and I.B.M. called their planned weapon the Power PC, and to make sure they had sufficient firepower, they recruited the big chip maker Motorola Inc. to their team."

According to every time line I can fine: Apple had been doing their own experiments with RISC in the 1980's, they tried Motorola 88K but rejected it after IBM approached Apple. Apple always demand a second source, so it became obvious to offer Motorola a chance to get in on the action. Plus they needed to make sure they weren't screwed over by Motorola in the time until the PowerPC was being shipped.

All those negotiations appear to have happened years before emplant.

[psxphill]

LMFAO nah mainstream media Never lies. They always tell the truth! hahahah what a joke

Sure the media is run by people, so you have to accept that all people are capable of lying. Even the people who say that the media are reporting fake news.

However it's not just the ny times reporting that version of events and there is no advantage to be gained from lying.

[psxphill]

Also, do you know anything about the 64bit CPU chip that Apple was working on before PPC? Both Andy Hertzfeld and Carl Sassenrath's have spoke about it over the years. They each talked about Jobs setting up an advanced research group for the future of Apple.

Aquarius was their own RISC CPU project, which looks like an expensive wet dream. Then Jaguar (the Motorola 88K project) came and went.

http://lowendmac.com/2014/ibm-apple-risc-and-the-roots-of-the-powerpc/
http://lowendmac.com/2006/growing-apple-with-the-macintosh-the-sculley-years/
http://applemuseum.bott.org/sections/ppc.html