Mac PPCs and Amiga PPCs - OS compatibility?

[Iggy_Drougge]

Sadly, the PC is the only machine which actually does run AROS. The Amiga port has been abandoned for a long time, though I do hear news about someone investigating its re-portability once more.

What would actually make AROS useful right now would be a port to m68k Macs. They're extremely cheap, and use the same processor, so there should be a high degree of binary compatibility with cleanly written Amiga software, at least if you fill out the blanks in AROS with bits and pieces from your own copy of OS3.

[Iggy_Drougge]

Cold booting a 68k Mac straight into an alien OS is a bit difficult. It's not undoable, but there is a lot of hardware out there which needs to be set up before use (much like most VGA cards, which have a ROM with x86 code used to set the card up, making their use on non-PCs next to impossible), but once MacOS has done its job, nothing prevents you from using a second OS loader to throw MacOS out.
NetBSD has been ported to the Mac since ages, and it uses this approach (though a bootloader not involving MacOS at all has also been investigated). And since it's BSD, it's free for your use.

Another path is that one used by MagiC, a reimplementation of Atari's TOS. While it's originally for the real Ataris, it's been ported to the Mac, but runs inside MacOS, on its own screen. This makes porting much simpler, since you're addressing MacOS interfaces, instead of the hardware devices themselves. Much like Shapeshifter et al on the Amiga. I've always wondered why no-one just ripped the CPU emulation out of UAE and compiled it for the Mac. After all, there is already a MacUAE, just not for the 68k ones.

(On another note, the only way to play MP3s on a 68k Mac is by running an Atari MP3 player under MagiC; Mac users themselves have always claimed that a 68k processor can't handle the load. ;-)

[Iggy_Drougge]

Kronos wrote:
@Iggy_Drougge

Not sure where you were pointin at ...

Something like running AmigaOS in an UAE where the 68k-emu is replaced by the actual 68k in the Mac ?

I'm pointing at either an AROS port or a UAE port without CPU emulation.

Sounds good, won't work ...
There are alot of dependancies between the chipset-emu and the 68k, which just wouldn't work with the real 68k.

Why would I want to emulate a chipset which I don't ever use on my Amiga? Amithlon doesn't emulate any more chipset than necessary to please the Kickstart.
Once again, think of Shapeshifter, Fusion and AMax on the Amiga, or the lesser-known Atari emulators.

One could try to start from the point were the Draco left, but that would require lots of work in that machines Hard and Software.

So it might, but it might turn out a lot easier than writing an entire emulator, especially since someone has already done that for you.

My advice (properly useless): Port the x11-hosted version of AROS to Mac(68k)/BSD.
Dead slow, but possible. Port that one to MacOS.
Still slow, but fun.

Exactly why would AROS be dead slow? Have the programmers been lazy?

Or just wait for Bernie to release the 68k_2_PPC-JIT for UAE he has been working on lately.

Once again a CPU emulator. Why buy an expensive PowerMac and waste all of its processor on emulating a lowly 680x0, when people are paying you to take their old Macs with real 68k processors?