2Hours 7min to go... (Installing MacOS X on a PC)

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Until MacOS X.2 is installed... :-D

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Vincent wrote:
:-o

Are you feeling ok? You'd better lie down...

Wait... are you the real bloodline???  You're not are you??

What've you done with him?!

:-P

:roflmao:

It's ok! I'm installing it on PearPC :-D The Installer optimistically suggested that the install would take "about 18hours"... So you can imagine my delight when 18 dropped down to 2:07 in the space of 10min.

MacOS X is surprisingly speedy on my old 600Mhz Athlon!

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x56h34 wrote:
When I saw the subject line I thought that the thread was for sure going to be about an eBay auction. :oops:

Sorry, yeah, I should change it to explain that it's about a PowerPC emulator :-)

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:-o

Click here to see MacOS X on my old 600Mhz PC

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Vincent wrote:
Right, now to get it running as the default shell ;-)

Looks nice :-)

It's not quite fast enough to use as the default shell :-D And I realise now why I don't actually own a Mac.. the OS looks good, but really does suck :-(

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bloodline wrote:

Vincent wrote:
Right, now to get it running as the default shell ;-)

Looks nice :-)

It's not quite fast enough to use as the default shell :-D And I realise now why I don't actually own a Mac.. the OS looks good, but really does suck :-(

Ok after playing for a while on my laptop, MacOS X isn't that bad :-D I certainly could live with it. You just have to get used to things disappearing and then reappearing later :-?

PearPC is great! It's certainly at a stage where the CPU core cold be integrated into UAE and it would be very useful.

The PPC CPU emulation is very quick and integer non memory access loops and such run at about a 3rd the speed of a real PPC, this is set to improve when the JIT book keeping instructions are removed fromthe JIT.

The Big problems come when the PPC access the memory... At the moment The Host CPU has to emulate the PPC MMU... every memory access has be be translated... From the PearPC website there are plans to build a special driver for Windows that will allow the PPC emulator to use the x86 MMU which should speed things up dramtically :-D

The second problem is the FPU... The x86's Stack based FPU requires careful programming to make it work well... PPC software is oblivious to this fact and so FPU instructions are very slow :-(

Altivec apparently maps almost directly to the x86 SSE instruction set so causes no speed hit... There is talk of useing SSE to do the FPU emulation which would speed that up alot.

Good show all around!! :-)

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Ilwrath wrote:
@ bloodline -
Yeah, using the PPC emulation core in UAE would be ultra-wicked.  Especially after those speed-up tweeks.  As it was, the first version of PearPC gave me a usable (but still quite slow [maybe 100mhz PPC from a 3.0ghz P4]) PPC Macintosh.  Those updates would easily be able to make a WinUAE PC be truely the fastest classic Amiga.  :-)  I've never owned a PPC Amiga, but I'd love to play around and see how it all works.

I still have my BlizPPC wating for anything interesting that might come my way...

But anyway, I think UAE is a prefect candidate for PPC emulation... it just needs a coder who is familier with AmigaPPC solutions.

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Karlos wrote:
Is there some sort of native DirectX/OpenGL wrapper for Quartz  extreme with this emulator? That would give the OSX desktop a real boost.

I've not seen mention of anything like that on the dev site... but the Emulator is written using SDL so implementing some kind of OpenGL layer shouldn't be too difficult...

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Given that the emulation can only presently reach older PPC levels of performance, making the most of your graphics hardware seems to be an obvious optimisation for improving the overall result.

I think someone should suggest this to them :-)

I've not had a peek at the source code yet, so I'm not sure how the gfx are rendered... I'm guessing that it's a frame buffer system... but it seems perhaps a little faster than a simple FB driver would be... I note that PearPC comes with a graphics driver from MacOnLinux, which it appears to use :-?

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Karlos wrote:

bloodline wrote:

Given that the emulation can only presently reach older PPC levels of performance, making the most of your graphics hardware seems to be an obvious optimisation for improving the overall result.

I think someone should suggest this to them :-)

And have you? ;-)

I'm not in contact with them, and until I have had time to go poking around in the source code, I'm not going to waste their time with my drivel :-D

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Glaucus wrote:
How long do you think it would take to install OS4.0 on that PearPC??? :-D

 - Mike

I don't know I've never installed OS4 :-) (The MacOS X install only took about an hour in the end...).