Useable PPC Emulator

[locutus]

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 /

[locutus]

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 //

[locutus]

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

[locutus]

And actually emulating that wont be needed at all :-)

(just the memory map has to be the same)