Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Software Issues and Discussion => Topic started by: _stet_ on February 04, 2009, 07:00:37 PM
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Perhaps this is a stupid question, but it's bugging me so I'll just ask:
Why isn't there a full-speed AmigaOne or Pegasos emulator (or virtual machine, whatever) that can be run on fast PowerPC-based computers (i.e. PPC Macs)?
It seems (to a novice like myself) that a fast PPC system with plenty of RAM should be capable of emulating a slower PPC system pretty effectively.
I've read there are issues with drivers, etc. that make it unlikely OS 4 will ever run natively on Apple hardware, but wouldn't a virtual-machine type solution get around that problem?
Is there some technical barrier? Legal barrier? Lack of interest? Or what?
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Great idea!
Someone should inform Hyperion about this idea!
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the same reason why there is no window xp/vista emulator.... :roll:
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A1260 wrote:
the same reason why there is no window xp/vista emulator.... :roll:
AmigaOne and Pegasos are hardware, Windows XP and Vista are software.
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I think you need a law degree to understand the rift between Hyperion and Amiga... But here's my uneducated $0.02...
I think legal is the barrier, as there isn't anything too terribly technical that would prevent it.
Hyperion is on record that they don't want to compete with windows, and they see locking OS 4 to hardware (specifically proprietary and not x86) their only option.
Hyperion has also stated they believe Aros, and other Amiga "clone" OS's to be illegal. (at least as far as they are concerned)
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Open Firmware is the biggest problem. There was a G4 emulator that was being used to run MacOS on X86, under emulation, but last I heard, it wasn't robust enough to even attempt to run OS4. Same problem with the RISC emu.
My thoughts were you would need at least a core duo at 3.0ghz to make it even bearable to run at a decent speed. I'm not sure if that's entirely accurate, however.
Someone out there, with more technical experience could elaborate more (waiting patiently for Piru or Bloodline). Me, I'd much rather go back to my reading on Quantum Mechanics. ;-)
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Remember, I'm asking about emulation on PowerPC hardware not x86 hardware... I'd think emulating a PPC system on a PPC system would be drastically faster than emulating a PPC system on an x86 system.
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http://bigfoot.morphos-team.net/test/qemu.png
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Piru wrote:
http://bigfoot.morphos-team.net/test/qemu.png
[ot]
Very cool, WindowMaker! I've used that for years, nowadays it's Awesome and Fluxbox.
[/ot]
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@ _stet_
I would say lack of interest is the biggest hurdle. In terms of emulating the PPC it makes little difference if the host is an x86 or a PPC... I used MacOS 10.3 in PearPC (an x86 PPC emulator, google it) for a good few months before buying a Mac... OSX was slugish, but usable on my old Athlon64 @2Ghz... The slowest part of PPC emulation is the MMU... Apparently...
Of course, much faster would be a PPC VM on a real PPC chip... But I've not seen or used one...
If someone wrote a suitable BIOS for PearPC, it should boot OS4.1... The same applies to MOS... Driver issues aside.
The question remains, where does the motivation come from... If you are so desparate to run these systems, just buy the hardware for them, it will be faster, better supported and money will flow back to the devs and help keep the project alive :-)
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There is only one reason why there is no A1/Peg emulator:
Nobody's written one.
It's a lot of work, and 99.9999% of the people who have the capability don't need to.
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bloodline wrote:
If someone wrote a suitable BIOS for PearPC, it should boot OS4.1...
No need to write a BIOS, U-Boot is open source. Porting it for use with QEMU would be far better than with PearPC though.
Still have driver issues to deal with though.
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PearPC is basically abandonware, the principle programmer died and Apple abandoned IBM PowerPC chips. The project hasn't had an update in 3 years. The big issue wold be replacing the pseudo OpenFirmware with uBoot and dealing with the video driver issues. The OpenFirmware code that is in place is ugly but the video poses a bit of programming issues.
All this could be overcome of course, but the only people interested in an Amiga OS4 emulator are Amiga folks, probably numbered in the hundreds, most of whom are not programmers. We don't have the resources. The people capable of doing it are not interested, at least not for free...
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mongo wrote:
bloodline wrote:
If someone wrote a suitable BIOS for PearPC, it should boot OS4.1...
No need to write a BIOS, U-Boot is open source. Porting it for use with QEMU would be far better than with PearPC though.
Still have driver issues to deal with though.
PearPC provides an emulation of a basic PPC Mac... So any OS than can boot a PPC Mac (i.e. MorphOS) can boot it... Then you are half way there :-)
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@spirantho
Nobody's written one.
Lets try again:
http://bigfoot.morphos-team.net/test/qemu.png
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the same reason why there is no window xp/vista emulator....
He's asking for an AmigaOne virtual machine similar to Shapeshifter allowed 68K Mac on Amiga. PearPC or QEMU could probably be adapted, or OS4 could be ported to it directly if they wanted to.
http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/
http://bellard.org/qemu/
There's lots of virtual machines for Windows.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_platform_virtual_machines
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by Piru on 2009/2/5 15:57:13 @spirantho Quote: Nobody's written one. Lets try again: http://bigfoot.morphos-team.net/test/qemu.png
Perhaps you should try using text to explain your point, because that image shows qemu running on some flavour of Unix/Linux, but does not make it clear that Morphos is running in qemu.
When they say a picture is worth a thousand words, they may be talking bollocks.
________
Honda cr480 (http://www.cyclechaos.com/wiki/Honda_CR480)
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Piru wrote:
@spirantho
Nobody's written one.
Lets try again:
http://bigfoot.morphos-team.net/test/qemu.png
Hey Piru, am I able to get the "demo" MOS to run in QEmu?
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@bloodline
Hey Piru, am I able to get the "demo" MOS to run in QEmu?
In short: No
(The public qemu doesn't include the pegasos2 hardware and openfirmware emulation)
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Piru wrote:
@bloodline
Hey Piru, am I able to get the "demo" MOS to run in QEmu?
In short: No
(The public qemu doesn't include the pegasos2 hardware and openfirmware emulation)
I guessed as much, but it was worth a go :-) I don't have any devices capable of displaying the video output of any of my Amiga's any more... so I doubt I'll ever run MOS on my BlizzPPC :-(
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@Piru
I would be happy with at least the radeon emu code added to the qemu repository...
PS. Yes, I do realise that bigfoot does not really have to.
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_stet_ wrote:
Remember, I'm asking about emulation on PowerPC hardware not x86 hardware... I'd think emulating a PPC system on a PPC system would be drastically faster than emulating a PPC system on an x86 system.
Depends on the host's X86/X64 and PPC processors. The other PPC emulator for X86/X64 is Dolphin GC/Wii emulator.
For example;
Zelda Twilight Princess for Wii on Dolphin Emulator
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX31YpzT7Zs
Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 @ 3.2Ghz (it's not even Intel Core i7)
Geforce 8800GT (overclocked).
IBM PowerPC G3 class "Broadway" @729Mhz + ATI Hollywood GPU (reportly clocked @243 MHz) being emulated at playable speeds.
The example's PC config rivals a real SAM440 or PowerMac G3 @700Mhz hardware.
Atm, there’s a lack of interest to emulate AOS4/MOS2.x from the X86 side. Secondly, there's the native X86 AROS.
For income and development, X86 side prefers to emulate ARM based machines.
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No change in accidentally allowing the modified QEMU out to say TPB?
(http://ui17.gamespot.com/880/pirate2_4.gif)(http://www.scubaboard.com/forums/images/smilies/TLAPD-pirate2.gif)
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persia wrote:
No change in accidentally allowing the modified QEMU out to say TPB?
(http://ui17.gamespot.com/880/pirate2_4.gif)
Not sure if that would be beneficial to Piru :-D ;-)
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What is Hyperion using to develop OS4? I assume Classic for OS4, A1 for OS4.1,Peg2 for its version etc.
An obvious answer, it is. :-D
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Piru wrote:
@spirantho
Nobody's written one.
Lets try again:
http://bigfoot.morphos-team.net/test/qemu.png
Surely it would be easier to simply add support for MorphOS in Q-OS.
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(The public qemu doesn't include the pegasos2 hardware and openfirmware emulation)
Then why showing it ? Any plan to release the so called pegasos2 hardware & openfirmware emulation ?
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@warpdesign
Then why showing it?
To point out that it is not impossible and that it has been done at least once already (and hey it is pretty much on topic in this thread don't you agree?). You just need skilled (and motivated) enough developer to do it.
Why shouldn't I show it?
Any plan to release the so called pegasos2 hardware & openfirmware emulation ?
Not that I am aware of. Perhaps some day.
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To point out that it is not impossible and that it has been done at least once already (and hey it is pretty much on topic in this thread don't you agree?). You just need skilled (and motivated) enough developer to do it.
I do agree. But is this all about: "you're wrong, I did it, so shut up" ?
What's the use ?
Would be more constructive to actually release it...
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@warpdesign
But is this all about : "you're wrong, I did it, so shut up" ?
I'm sorry you see it that way.
And for the record I didn't do it, Mark Olsen did.
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Piru wrote:
@warpdesign
But is this all about : "you're wrong, I did it, so shut up" ?
I'm sorry you see it that way.
And for the record I didn't do it, Mark Olsen did.
Academic anyway... what features of the quark microkernel are required to run MorphOS? Any chance you guys will swap it out and then recompile MOS for use on top of... maybe Linux/etc... and run it on an nice x86-64 machine? :-D
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bloodline wrote:
Academic anyway... what features of the quark microkernel are required to run MorphOS? Any chance you guys will swap it out and then recompile MOS for use on top of... maybe Linux/etc... and run it on an nice x86-64 machine? :-D
I doubt it is Quark holding back MorpOS from x86 but the endianess-problem of ABox. W/o same endianess no legacy compatibility (except you swap everything that is). Or do you have a plan how a lille endian process can share structs with a big endian process? And I really mean *share with* not pass to.
I am not good in informatics, but actually I do see the main prob here.
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i d like to remember at all, that there is a PowerPC emulator for Windows that emulate very well MacOS pre X.
this emulator run MacOS and some application very whell and some games, like Tomb Raider
But, an emulator for AmigaPPC is tabu
maybe there are some interests that contrast this way...
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@mschulz
MorphOS 1.4.5 could run using m68k drivers like S3 Trio64, S3 Virge and *Cirrus Logic GD5446* so don't assume they have a Radeon emulation for qemu, BigFoot could have simply updated a little the old MorphOS1.4.5 driver for PicassoIV and get MorphOS working.
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Why isn't there a full-speed AmigaOne or Pegasos emulator (or virtual machine, whatever) that can be run on fast PowerPC-based computers (i.e. PPC Macs)?
I don't know about Pegasos but as far as the AmigaOne goes why would anyone want to emulate broken hardware?
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PearPC hasn't beentouched in almost 3 years. It suffered two devastating blows, first the death of it's principle programmer and then Apple's switch from IBM to Intel chips...
There's probably some way to get it to work with OS4, but it's not a task I want to undertake.
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the way could be to adapt SheepShaver to run OS4 or MOS or to include in WinUAE a PowerPC emulation.