PC Emulation on A1?

[Bodie]

Personally, there are a few obscure MS-DOS applications (mainly econometric stuff such as Frontier 4.1, DEAP ) I would like to use.  PC-Task and PCx would be more than up to the task, I hope  :-)

Cheers

[Desler]

Felix wrote:

What about Bochs ?
There already is a native MorphOS port,
it should be possible to make a OS4 port
from that sources.

Eventhough Bochs is fairly easy to port, its slooow as hell. (1.5 mips on a 400 mhz or something dont quite remember).
The main problem with Bochs is that everything is written in C for portability. Now if someone replaced the code for the x86 emulation with a more advanced emulation (JIT, assembler code dont really know how much is possible) we could actually have a nice and fast emulation.
A pc emulator WOULD indeed be really nice to have

[ksk]

How fast is VirtualPC on modern Mac or on MacOnLinux on AmigaOne/pegasos?

[whabang]

ViritualPC is very usable. You shouldn't expect P-IV  speeds, though...

[Helgis75]

Quite an interesting point! Would love to be able to emulate PC on AmigaOne. I believe this is possible, but there may be different possibilities to to this. One possibility is to run Windows under LinuxPPC, as it's possible with MacOS X Jaguar under it, the other one is to have some kind of a native PC-emulator. I don't know, but it should be completely possible...I can't see the problem in making this possible... :-)

[MarkTime]

You didn't ask, per se, but most people are wondering the same thing, can you run PC games....

Short answer is 'NO', even the fastest Mac, running a very mature highly optimized accelerator like Virtual PC, cannot run the latest PC 3D games......2D games, if they are spec'd low enough will work, but if it required hardware 3d acceleration, in general, you can forget about it....no modern 3d games will work at playable speeds.  

Thats on a Mac, and on the Amiga, the situation is even worse, with less optimized emulators, and even less likely someone would right the native 3d driver to emulated machine drive interface that you would need to get 3d acceleration working in the emulated box.

And on the amiga where the native 3d stuff is likely only a subset, not a superset of what the emulated machines 3d driver...well, a lot has to change before getting 3d accelerated games (even of the Mac variety) to work on Amiga hardware.

[Wilse]

I'd be interested in emulating a PC initially, only as way of tempting my g/f away from her PC. Then I would hope to gradually switch everything across to AOS and eventually only have one machine in use.

I think that we want is work with windows appa on the Amiga,
 we need a windows emulator not a PC emulator.
A port of WINE will be good for use those windows apps

[BADHead]

or if emulation was not fast enough
a pci card to slot into the A1  a
shark PC card Elbox would have made
a lot more money than trying upgade
the a1200 :-o
as i have thought about buying a shark
ppc card but i have so many bits on
my a1200 i think affects the stability
of computer and os so i think i will
be investing in a A1

[alx]

From what i've heard, WINE needs a x86 (since it's not an emulator) and a VM like bochs would be the only answer.

Though maybe it would be possible to somehow implement the Win32 APIs - it'd be hard, though, and microsoft would't like it one bit!

One of the reasons I was very excited about the proposed NG Amiga running on X86 was the ability to dual boot the Amiga with Windows and thus ease the software  transition.   I’m into graphics and animation.  

When new and better software appeared for the Amiga I could purchase it and let the old Windows stuff  fall into disuse.

Soo being able to run PC software on a new Amiga would be just as good - better even! :-)

Bob C.

[huronking]

Didnt NT4.0 have Mips, DECAlpha and PPC versions
on the same CD? I could be wrong on that(its been
a LONG time) but if the PPC version worked on A1 it would make PC emulation beyond DOS moot.

[CaptainFrank]

Here`s an idea that might speed up the emulation...

Make a driver for Windows that`s written in PPC code, that redirects the windows graphics acceleration into P96 ones

Someone could also make a DirectX8 driver for Warp3d (Nova)

The IDE control could also be re-written

Just an idea....

[CaptainFrank]

> Didnt NT4.0 have Mips, DECAlpha and PPC versions
> on the same CD?

It certainly had those versions, I don`t know if they all came on the same CD though...

[hnl_dk]

alx wrote:

From what i've heard, WINE needs a x86 (since it's not an emulator) and a VM like bochs would be the only answer.

Though maybe it would be possible to somehow implement the Win32 APIs - it'd be hard, though, and microsoft would't like it one bit!

As it has been posted on the WinE mailing, it should be possible to build the CPU emulation of Bochs into WinE to make it possible to run x86-Windows software on other systems :-D

If someone would port WinE itself, then we could be able to use the few PPC-Windows programs, from WinNT-PPC :-D But there are only few!

[hnl_dk]

huronking wrote:

Didnt NT4.0 have Mips, DECAlpha and PPC versions
on the same CD? I could be wrong on that(its been
a LONG time) but if the PPC version worked on A1 it would make PC emulation beyond DOS moot.

Yep, they where all on the disc, but what would you use it for ... there where only few PPC-Windows aplications!!!

If someone would port WinE to AmigaOS4, then we would anyway be able to use those aplications :-D