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

[JimDrew]

Today, just as back in the day, PCx and FUSION are hands down faster than PCTask and Shapeshifter...

https://youtu.be/Ga1_wfsl4rg

The beta version of PCx with Vampire optimizations that I released is the fastest version yet!

I have no idea what "WOS" is.  iFUSION along with all of my PPC stuff was sold, so I never made a PPC version of PCx. I have no desire to do anything PPC based ever again.  FPGA is the way to go.  

[JimDrew]

Is the beta version for the Vampire available somewhere? Or is it an internal beta?

It was an internal beta.  I haven't been in touch with the Vampire team in months because of my day job.

I plan on releasing the PCx and FUSION (both optimized for the Vampire boards) when I get a chance.

[JimDrew]

That's great!
I'm just wondering how usable it is today.

Today, its just for nostalgia.  It's not fast enough (even on a Vampire) for any serious work.  It runs Windows 3.1 just fine, and probably could run Windows 95... but that's it.  Later versions of Windows expected newer architecture and won't run.

The PPC versions had been promised by 'Microcode Solutions'. iFusion PPC was released, but unfortunately PCx PPC was never published.

That's not true.  I don't make promises about software.  I was stating what was planned.  We did work on a PPC version of PCx briefly, and a version of PCx was released for the Mac and PowerMac.  When iFUSION was sold to Blittersoft (along with source code, etc.) I completely abandoned PPC.  I think it's the worst CPU ever made.  IBM conned Apple into using it originally, and they finally got smart and switched to something much faster.  I was stunned when I heard that the next generation Amiga was going to be PPC based.  What a mistake that was.  That limited the sheer number of people who could have been exposed to the great Amiga OS.  Had the next generation Amiga gone x86 based, it would be at least (if not more so) popular as Linux is today.

[JimDrew]

And a 'Pentium CPU' is listed as 'Minimum System  requirements' for WinXP, while for Win98se it still was 'just' an "Intel  80486DX2 66 MHz or a compatible CPU with a math coprocessor (Pentium  processor recommended)" according to Wikipedia.

So I thought PCx would - at least theoretically - be capable to run  WinXP (at an extremely slow speed, of course). Just the max amount of  RAM in my Miggy seemed to be 'showstopper'. WinXP needed at least 256mB  RAM, while my system just had the 128 mB on the CSPPC plus 2mB CHIP  mem...

Well, it might run WinXP, I have never tried it.   You have to remember that Windows95 didn't even exist yet when EMPLANT's  e586dx emulation was written, and that was the basis for PCx.

Well Jim, I don't know what was going on 'behind the scenes' back then.
I can only tell that this was what the customers here in Germany got as information for PCx on the old HAAGE & PARTNER Amiga page:

16 Juni 99: Fusion PPC Vorbestellung
 Microcode Solutions erwartet bis zum 1. Juli 500 Vorbestellungen um die  Produkte Fusion und PCx für den PowerPC fertigzustellen. Wir finden  dieses Vorgehen aus verschiedenen Gründen bedenklich, doch da die erste  Stufe noch keiner Vorauszahlung bedarf, kann man so sein Interesse an  dem Produkt nochmals bekunden. Link

(June 16th, 1999: Pre-ordering Fusion PPC
Microcode Solutions requires 500 pre-orders by July 1st to complete the  products "Fusion" and "PCx" for the PowerPC. We find this course of  action questionable for several reasons, but as no pre-payment is  required in this first phase, this is a way to express interest in the  product once more. link)

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.

The  Pentium 1 was introduced on March 22, 1993 and Commodore declared  bankruptcy on April 29, 1994 and ceased to exist. So it seems it already  was too late for a change...

I was talking about machines produced after the CBM bankruptcy, making future OS4 machines based on x86 instead of PPC.

While I was looking around for the old Microcode Solutions website backups, I found the source code to iFUSION and iFUSE.  iFUSE was the PC version a PowerMac emulation that used the GXC604e PCI CPU card.  I had a deal with the company to provide the Mac emulation for their board, but their company struggled and the card was never released.  That was too bad - that actually was a great piece of hardware, providing 512MB of RAM directly connected to the CPU.  The PCI bus was the bridge for the peripherals (video/audio/serial/etc.) and the "Mac" ran exclusively on the RAM of the card.  No libraries to deal with, which was the biggest battle for iFUSION on the Amiga.

[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.  

[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.  

[JimDrew]

A little late in response (I find this post by accident)...

The EMPLANT didn't use PALs or GALs, instead I used PEELs.  Way better from a development standpoint as they are reusable and super fast.