Amiga Video Toaster in FPGA just like minimeg

[B00tDisk]

Most people I knew with a video toaster back in the day simply called it the Lightwave Dongle and only used it as long as they had to before NT decoupled the software from the hardware, and then switched to commodity PCs when NT branched out to other platforms...

[B00tDisk]

Or at least until Lightrave came out surely.

Well by then this group of 4-5 people I knew with toasters already had them, so Lightrave, while cool, wasn't really of any use.  Plus NT did their standalone version of LW which effectively killed Lightrave.

[B00tDisk]

Virtualization is a bit more - and less - than emulation.  It isn't just semantic hair-splitting, either (unless you don't care about the details, then I guess it is).  I don't think I'm "virtualizing" when I run WinUAE on my PC.  However, when running MacOS through Fusion or Shapeshifter or Sheepshaver or whatever on the Amiga, I do.  It has to do with the specificity of the processor in question.

But, again, if you don't care, that's fine.

[B00tDisk]

Originally virtual machines covered emulating enough to run multiple operating systems on one computer. One of the requirements was that it was efficient, which pretty much precludes emulating the cpu. The 68000 didn't support virtualisation, but the 68010 did (i.e. MOVE from SR became privileged).

So for running windows on an intel mac you can use virtualisation software like VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop. If you want to run windows on a power pc mac you need to run an emulator like Virtual PC 7

The term virtual machine has been used incorrectly over the years though, which muddies that water a little. The Java Virtual Machine for instance. It's not a real virtual machine in a lot of ways, but the name stuck. Technically all "operating systems" should be running under a hypervisor and not have any access to the hardware, this is largely impractical now though down to how operating systems and device drivers are developed. Windows Hyper-V Server is realistically the closest you can get.

Agreed.

I was reading up on it a bit, almost 20 years ago, when I was working the night shift in a data center (and well before the notion of desktop virtualization was a common idea); when IBM created the S360, they wondered what to do with all that computing power (for the time) so one of the first things the created was virtualization: running a copy of the system on the system itself.