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Amiga News and Community Announcements => Amiga News and Community Announcements => Amiga Software News => Topic started by: Jethro_Tull on May 19, 2004, 03:43:02 PM
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While browsing through my favourite web sites, I stumbled upon this intriguing little program. It claims to emulate a PPC based platform at reasonable speeds. To back the author's claims, a reviewer on www.osnews.com has succesfully booted MacOS X on his low-spec x86 PC. Since the emulator is open source, building an AmigaOne emulator should be relativly easy, as long as the April northbridge specs are avaiable. Just imagine running the long awaited OS4 and your Amiga programs on your cheap, powerfull PC!
Links below:
http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/about.html
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=7085
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And how would one get hold of OS4 to run on their cheap powerful PC? It won't be on KazZaA, for sure.
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Okay, i'll comment on this thingy.
I installed it a couple of days ago, and started to hack around with it, it is possible to install OSX ofcourse, but the speed is dog slow :-)
The Gfx and I/O performence of the emulation isn't that bad at all, but the CPU Core is lacking.
The CPU core exists atm in 2 versions, a purely interpreting core, and a Just In Time Compiler (think Amithlon's m68k core).
What most people assume to be such a big problem is the amount of registers the PPC has, this actually isn't THAT big of a problem at all, in interpretive mode it will indeed waste quite a bit of cycles (less then you might assume, as the 'registers' stay in L1 Data cache) on JIT this is only a problem when running a piece of code for the first time, after that the code will get ranslated to native x86 code (the "Just in time COMPILATION" thingy, right ? ;-) *grin* )
/ I think i just hitted a Post-lenght barrier /
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The really big performence problems atm are mostly Adressing related, as atm the CPU has to manually recalculate the Adress range conversion from PPC to x86 (the dev of this piece of software said to me that he was thinking about doing something with the x86 MMU to handle this), more or less also comes with this Branching, which is awefully slow at the moment.
An estimation could be made that one could get this Emulation core to quite a bit more speed (the code is horrible btw imo) but it still will never be really fast (because x86/PPC translation is rather heavy).
To sum it up a bit:
It is a very nice piece of hardware (for version 0.1.1), BUT do _NOT_ expect to get any kind of decent performence on this emulator (MorphOS doesn't run by the way)
// argh again hit the limit //
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Neither expect to be ever able to use this kind of emulation in the same way as the m68k JIT from UAE/Amithlon (running AmigaOS faster then on the real hardware).
But, who am i to ramble about this stuff ? i'm not developing it, so please, dont torch me down when Seppel (the main dev) miraciously gets it to 70% Efficiency.
And on my own experience with this emulator, installing OSX in a minimum install took 11 Hours on this Duron1300, yes i know, LOW end stuff and that people WILL comment on that, but still it shows that it's not performence you are getting atm :)
Anyway, i'm stopping with rambling now.
-- Locutus
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Maybe the post length is limited on news items? The number of posts on news items is unlimited, so when there's a lot of posts a news item page takes forever to load. Maybe limiting post length is the cheap way AO is trying to keep the load times down. "Cheap" because it would make more sense to wrap to several different pages when the post count goes up like in the forums.
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Since the emulator is open source, building an AmigaOne emulator should be relativly easy, as long as the April northbridge specs are avaiable.
In fact its a Mai Articia Northbridge in the Amiga One, April was a chip from some other company ;-)
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And actually emulating that wont be needed at all :-)
(just the memory map has to be the same)
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Has anyone installed Mac OSX 10.2? I tried but I got a strange read only error message from the install script!
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And how would one get hold of OS4 to run on their cheap powerful PC?
By buying it when it's released?!
Oh... I see what you mean! :lol:
WinUAE has become faster and more stable over time, I see no reason why a PPC emulator won't be any different. :-)
Steve.
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And actually emulating that wont be needed at all
(just the memory map has to be the same)
The bigger problem will be to emulate uboot and the "secret os4 enabling code"/dongle in the Amiga One Bios. Besides that, everyone who wanted to run os4 emulated on x86 legally would have to buy an A1 board.
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I've already voiced my concerns about this in the associated Forum thread. In summary: It's bad news if OS4/MOS gets running under emulation.
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Give and take CPU power goes up 2 more Ghz or more, probably emulation speed, and a few updates and bug fixes later, will also increase. So as MATT would suggest, that this could be bad news for PPC users(including MAC users) cause the reason to buy PPC mobo will cease. Reminds me a bit like NewTek VT and LightWave being ported to PC. The reason for buying an Amiga also was history(sadly though) :-(
Good day to all Amigans! :-D
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I've already voiced my concerns about this in the associated Forum thread. In summary: It's bad news if OS4/MOS gets running under emulation.
If an architecture can be emulated at near full speed on similar spec hardware, it's not a good architecture. ;-)
Seriously, I'd be more worried about hacking AmigaOS to other PPC platforms. If a single person can write a Direct3D wrapper for Glide, a good cracker team can get OS4 running on a Mac or Pesasos (PegasosI has the same northbrige, remember?)
Once you go to PowerPC, you're stuck with it. I doubt emulation by itself really poses any threat to the Amiga market. I'm still pissed about the decision to go PPC native instead going the route of a virtual CPU, but I've already complained enough about x86 vs PPC in the past. People should stop stirring up the emulation paranoia.
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You have to buy a 3 GHz x86 to emulate something like a 75 MHz
Pseudo-G3. What will I need to emulate a G4 1GHz or a G5 2 GHz? And
all people now screaming that the PPC will die.
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A member of Microsoft has commented on PearPC...
Refer to;
http://groups.google.com.au/groups?q=PearPC+Microsoft&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=mecklists-3AB896.09312215052004%40msnews.microsoft.com&rnum=1
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all people now screaming that the PPC will die.
It may have another effect i.e. a demo for it’s ISA architecture.
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PearPC's long term speed problems will probably lie with the PPC MMU and the prophensity for PPC programs to use Big Endien Data.
The MMU problem wil be solved in time, but learning how PPC software tens to use the MMU, the Byte ordering problem won't be solved until the x86 grows a big endien mode/instructions.
All in all I expect this Emulator to get quite a bit faster, I see no reason to think that 70% of native speed is an unobtainable figure :-D
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if thats 70% then i am a genie in a bottle with wings ...
sorry guys but its been installing here at work now for over 8 hours and it aint done yet and btw i will head home in less than 30 minutes so....errmmmm WHAT?
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[AmigaOS 4+] won't be on KazZaA, for sure.
Of course it will. It doesn't matter if a piece of software checks an embedded serial number or something to see if you bought your hardware from the "right" place, or if it checks copy protection on a CD. Everything gets cracked.
The problem for AmigaOS is that it will not be for sale. The compulsory hardware licensing scheme means that there can be no paying AmigaOS customers for emulators or hardware from other vendors, while pirates won't be bothered. And they had the nerve to try to solicit knee-jerk support for this by claiming that it's an "anti piracy measure"... :P
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I see some comments on this subject as quite laughable.
First of all, this is a very young project and nowehere near any real optimisation. Anyone remember what the early UAE was like?
70% of native efficiency is probably possible - in time. Not today though, so I don't see why people are scoffing based on the performance at this point.
PPC paranoia: what the f...? If the PPC based systems are good enough, they'll survive. If not, tough. Uncompetitive products deserve to die, and if that's what is in store for AmigaOnes and Pegasos, so be it. Learn to live with that reality.
There's x86 emulation for the PPC (Bochs etc), so why shouldn't there be PPC emulation for the x86? One day people will laugh at the idea of writing CPU specific applications, indeed I suspect one day people will laugh at the idea of creating OS specific applications too.
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One day people will laugh at the idea of writing CPU specific applications, indeed I suspect one day people will laugh at the idea of creating OS specific applications too.
Didn't everyone predict Java would be dead ten years ago because it was so damn slow? In non-PC and console markets, it's about the only language used, these days.
Microsoft saw early that hardware dependence is trouble. Why don't companies learn?
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@Etho
IF the error was “FAILURE: DiskArbStart() -> 1102”
Change the
prom_env_machargs = "-v"
to
prom_env_machargs = ""
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Has anyone tried this again its like 8 years ago this post now..???