PPC PCI Card working in PC,possible?

[Piru]

@Blinx123

You mean Sonnet Crescendo/7200 G3?

It's a mac accelerator, I doubt it does much when connected to a PC. You'd need some sort of driver software to use it.

There are PowerPC-on-PCI-card solutions for PC though (G4 even).

[Piru]

@Blinx123

So could I play AMIGA PPC Games with it?

No. What makes you think you could?

I mean under WinUAE.

WinUAE is an amiga emulation. It emulates M68K CPU and Amiga custom chips. How could it use the PPC PCI card to emulate PowerUP hardware?

I can´t find a PPC PCI card specialy for PC. Which company does make one?

Use google?

Seriously now, these cards will not let you run Amiga PPC games.

[Piru]

@Blinx123

WinUAE amiga emulation is running 100% inside the closed environment, "a box". It doesn't see any PC hardware directly. Everything it sees is virtualized by WinUAE.

1) Just plugging some PCI card to system does not make it available for the emulated system.

2) "AMIGA OS" has no PPC support at all. Even if it would see the PPC PCI card, it would not know what to do with it. It would not work, even if you installed PowerUP or WarpUP software.

3) The PPC-on-PCI-cards are computers of their own. They run independent of the host system. Just plugging in such card doesn't magically make the CPU on the card available for the host system for some emulation purposes.


Computers don't work automagically. You need software to run the HW.

[Piru]

@Blinx123

But if a driver for WinUAE is written it should work.

No it won't.

It's much more likely that WinUAE gets PPC emulation at some point, but even that is remote possibility.

And as I know, AMIGA OS 3.9 supports POWERUP (PPC) hardware.

No, it really doesn't. The PowerUP "support" is just WarpUP archive in some contrib directory (maybe in 3.9 there's even installer for it, but anyway the OS 3.9 included version is buggy and should be avoided). The OS itself is fully 68K.

[Piru]

@Blinx123

But when WinUAE would get PPC emulation a PPC card would speed things up, am I right?

No.

[Piru]

@Blinx123

Now you got it.

There cards are used for embedded development and such special purposes. Some uses (quoting some manufacturers):
- Storage over IP
- Packet Analysis
- Content Switching
- Security
- Wi-Fi Gateway /switches
- High performance embedded computer systems

Typically these systems cost arm & leg. Many companies can customize the designs for specific needs.

[Piru]

@Blinx123

The blogg writer says the exact opposite of what Piru says.

No, he doesn't.

He thinks about running the whole OS on such card, the PC itself would be totally dorment and dummy (well using it for any co-processor functionality would add unnecessary complexity, it just wouldn't be sensible IMO). While such idea is surely possible, the fact is that such Crescendo card has very poor performance.

And the fact is that it won't happen by itself. This Crescendo card will not run AmigaOS 3.x, AmigaOS 4.x, MorphOS or AROS by itself.

It certainly has nothing to do with Windows or WinUAE.