Amiwest News

[commodorejohn]

how would that solve anything unless there is any windows software available for ppc???

Presumably that would be combined with an x86 JIT, though I've been baffled for years that WINE doesn't already include that for non-x86 architectures...

(There would also be whatever software was written for Windows NT 3.51 and 4.0 on PowerPC, but I don't know that there was ever much of that.)

[commodorejohn]

Im speaking from ignorance but is this feasible perfomance wise, when we're talking about the 1 ghz range of computers?

That's a good question, and I don't really know. I know trying to boot XP was agonizingly slow on my 2GHz Power Mac G5 (can't remember if that was using Bochs or QEMU,) but that may just reflect a crappy JIT, and anyway there's a big difference between emulating the whole PC and emulating the application code with the system calls translated to the host OS. I know for a while virtual-machine software was big business on PowerPC Macs for people that wanted to run PC software, and they'd always boast significant fractions of native speed, but I never used any of that myself.

[commodorejohn]

darwine has included a x86 emulator for years... or you could just use wine with the qemu userspace emulation layer.

Ah, interesting. Too bad it's abandoned. Any idea how performance is on PPC?

[commodorejohn]

Without JIT we see 386/40 kind of performance.
With jit ... perhaps P1/100 kind of ....

Where are you getting those numbers? They don't match up with even my crappy VM experience, let alone the claims made by professional virtual PC software of the time.

No one would have fun with any windows apps at that speed.
Better have a real x86 CPU there somewhere.

Actually, plenty of Windows software is usable at 100MHz. As long as you're not foolishly trying to run YouTube on a Pentium/100 or something, you can actually do a lot.