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

[OlafS3]

@Dandy

Yes RISC in general and PPC in special was very much hyped at that time. I rebought all the old magazines of the most popular amiga magazine at that time and there was only future is PPC, future is PPC, RISC is future, CISC is past and so on, not even any discussion about what is the better route.

[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.

[JimDrew]

Although the PPC is called "RISC", it's really far from that.  Yes, there are slightly fewer standard instructions than the typical CISC based CPUs, but with PPC you have every register/shift/rotate/address combination possible with every instruction.  Far more unique "instructions" are possible using the variations of every instruction.  But you need a lot of instructions to actually do something.    PPC is great if you are a bit fiddler because you can re-orient bits quite easily.  I guess if you are a C programmer, it probably doesn't matter to you.  I only programmed in PPC assembly.

Motorola was approached by IBM to make the PPC.  Apple had nothing to do with it.  Apple was waiting and watching what Motorola was doing with their programmable CPU core - that was a project that I worked on after making EMPLANT.  Motorola had a CPU where you could program all of the microcode, loaded from ROM (ala Xilinx/FPGA), and so we worked on 68K and x86 cores.  When the performance could not match what the IBM's PPC could offer, it was scrapped.  The core was only clocked at 25MHz, and I believe there was a 4x PLL internally.  It ran the 68K core at around 20MHz 030 speeds (no MMU or FPU).   Nothing blistering, but it was a start.  I look at what Gunnar has done with the Vampire core today and realize that we were ahead of our time for sure, and we just needed faster hardware.  

[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.

[bbond007]

I am not sure what the link showed, but I know  the pre-order thing was a joke.  We had around 30 pre-orders and that  was it.  Not worth the time, but iFUSION was completed and it worked (on the  Cyberstorm) and I sold it all off.

I did have a BlizzPPC 603e/060 with Bvision and later Grex/Voodoo.  I never understood why it would have been that much harder to make it also compatible with the A1200. I was not on any pre-order, but I would have purchased it... I purchased the 68K version...

[JimDrew]

I wasn't involved with transmeta, that was years after the work I did with Motorola's programmable microcode core.

Like I said, Apple had nothing to do with Motorola's involvement with PPC, that was all IBM's doing.  Joe and I met with IBM and were asked to consider making our x86 emulation core available for PPC native platforms as a substitute for Intel based systems.

I met Scully (and a room full of engineers) in Cupertino around the same time to discuss ROM licensing for the A4000/EMPLANT bundle.  That was an interesting trip.  

[paul1981]

Dude I don't know if you're kidding or not, I think you need to step back from the idea of a usable XP environment on a 233mhz CPU and 64mb RAM.  The lowest spec machine I would even attempt to run XP (without adding the service packs, mind you) on would be in the 500mhz range with 256mb RAM.  And even then, only to say "Okay, it boots up".  Once you start adding service packs to fix the various problems it has (like, security issues), that overhead goes way, way up.  You might run XP on those specs, but you won't run any programs in XP.

A few years ago my mate installed 'XP Black Edition' on a 32MB 200MHz Dell laptop. It booted up and ran but it obviously had a bit of a tendancy to eat into its virtual memory allowance.

[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.

[ferrellsl]

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

Wow, are you that naive?  I see lies in the press every day.   And why would Jim lie about it? It isn't like he has anything to gain by that, unlike the NYT and its investors at the time.  Just because it was in the news doesn't mean it was accurate or even true.  If you want to keep questioning his integrity and voracity you should probably take it up with him offline.

[smerf]

Transformer 1.2, after seeing the way this runs you will never want to see MSdos run again  LOL!!

[magnetic]

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

.

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

[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.

[Pentad]

I wasn't involved with transmeta, that was years after the work I did with Motorola's programmable microcode core.

Like I said, Apple had nothing to do with Motorola's involvement with PPC, that was all IBM's doing.  Joe and I met with IBM and were asked to consider making our x86 emulation core available for PPC native platforms as a substitute for Intel based systems.

I met Scully (and a room full of engineers) in Cupertino around the same time to discuss ROM licensing for the A4000/EMPLANT bundle.  That was an interesting trip.  

Jim could you expand on your interaction with Apple? I thought Emplant was an amazing product at the time and wonder what Apple thought of it? I had a 4k maxed out with a 24bit card during the later half of my university days and it ran circles around other Macs at the time. Faculty and fellow students were amazed that it was a multitasking emulator.

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.

Andy felt that Jobs was looking for more vertical integration and Apple making their own CPU would give them leverage. An advanced 64bit CPU to leap frog Motorola would have helped secure the Macintosh's future. However, Scully purged all things Jobs after the the failed coup.


Great memories of Emplant though!
-P

[LoadWB]

I have an Emplant.  Thanks to this thread I have moved "get Emplant working with MacOS and DOS" closer to the top of my TO-DO list.

[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

[Rabbi]

Uh, please, the New York Times continually gets their Mideast coverage wrong and sometimes issues corrections.  Just check out the fact-checking web site http://www.camera.org to see just how many times that The New York Times gets it wrong.