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PPC Emulators To Debut at MacWorld Tokyo
jx100 writes: "I've been following the Mac emulation community for awhile, and, apparently, Mac PPC emulators are about to be unveiled for the PC. Emaculation.com says that Microcode Solutions and Emulators Inc. are planning on showing their emulators at MacWorld Tokyo 2002."
"Just because things have been practically dead for us for over a year doesn't mean Mac emulation's days are over ..."
Your scope. So limited. Over a year? Heh.
We've had 040 since 1994 or so.
What's really happened since the first releases of Fusion, Executor and BasiliskII?
I'll tell you what. Color graphics. That's it. That's the big thing. Thats the only 'milestone' that's happened since this whole 68k mac emulation thing began. Oh okay and the ability to run a shitty 040 at the equivalent of a 68040-9000mhz. Whoop-dee-fucking-doo.
Up to now, what we've had has been a few useless toys that let us run Claris Works, Photoshop 3.0 and Escape Velocity. (Note to all of you guys out there who have a sincere need to keep running your 68k apps: you don't count. At all. I don't care what your excuse is. MOVE ON.)
Do you guys REALLY think that it's all going to come together one month from now?
Again, my point is, people who just discovered this scene a year or so ago don't realize how long it's REALLY been.
I mean. If you get on the train right before the last stop, you wonder what all the passengers who have been on there for 3000 miles are complaining about!
I'm not believing a goddamn thing until I see it running on my system.
Has any other respectable site besides Emaculation uttered a word about this? If this was really going to happen, Apple would be on Drew faster than Sony on Bleem.
Until I see it running - I'll have to conur with Duckie... "yawn".
From what Jim Drew has said, this isn't just about Macintosh emulation on a PC. His PPC product, whatever it may be, seems to have a much broader scope than that.
Y'all can start a countdown if you want, but I wouldn't be wetting my pants just yet.
Ceci n'est pas un post
For Amiga users with a PPC accelerator card, there's a product called iFusion, which lets an Amiga emulate an iMac. It's reputed to work with most software, and to work more quickly than a Mac with the equivalent processor, just as AMax did with an Amiga emulating a 680x0 Mac in the late 80s.
If you ever doubted the creative insanity of the Amiga community, let this put an end end your nonbelief.
Think different? Think melting watches in half a man's derby hat on a fish.
I could see it going two ways. One, very opposed to it, cease and disist orders all over the place.
Or, more likely, they will be completely silent about it. This would make sense from their point of view, suddenly people could start trying out OS X on their PC's. It won't be full speed or offer all the solutions that it will on a mac, but it will give people a really good "preview" of what they might be missing.
Really, what platform are these emulators being written for? Do they call x86 functions directly and reveal ppc instructions to the mac os or do they call direct x and windows apis and expose PPC to mac OS. Or,(pant-pant)does this run on linux/FreeBSD/*nix on x86? How hard to port OS X directly instead of emulating PPC?
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
If anything, he used too many paragraphs.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
The other way around.
I'm only responding to this AC, because he/she is SO wrong, that I would hope that their thought processes won't poison too many people.
PPC is Big Endian (the right way!) in it's Mac application, while x86 and other intel crap is little endian. There is no overhead in processing one way or the other, although the PPC is much more adept at handling endian issues than the antiquated x86.
From the beginning, the PPC architecture has featured bi-endian ability. Natively, it is Big Endian, like all real processors, favoring the Most Significant Bit (MSB) at the lowest adressed data line. Unlike almost all other processors though, the PPC can switch to Little Endian mode favoring the Least Significant Bit (LSB) at the lowest addressed data line. Big Endian is how we (westen culture humans) read binary numbers, while Little Endian is the other way arround.
The endian issue is only an issue when dealing with things like memory space and floating point numbers. Important problems, no doubt, but not so large that it would incapacitate most modern processors. The memory space issues are usually handled in hardware (PCI is little endian even in the Mac), while transform functions (think MMX, SSE, 3DNow) could easily deal with endian data issues.
Connectix Virtual PC actually switches the endianness of the PPC chip in execution, to help emulate the x86. This does make the emulation much faster. Unfortunately, the same trick cannot be used on x86 to emulate the PPC, as MMX and friends would cause a context switch and register flush on both sides of execution. If the code were to be dynamically recompiled though, the endian issue could be greatly reduced by only doing the conversion when absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, the differences between CISC and RISC code (ignoring AltiVec) would make this a very difficult proposition. RISC's ability to emulate CISC instruction sets is why both intel and AMD have RISC cores in both the P6 family and the Athlon, and not the other way around.
-- Len
should learn new tricks. Especially AC dumbastic trolls.
//c to connect to my University's mainframe. It had the Control key where the Caps Lock key now sits. Blame the PC for the current location and get a USB keyboard with the control key where you want it.
Why do you need the Control key placed there? PC's have the Control key in the exact same place as where Apple put it, because it makes it so much easier to press Alt-Ctrl-Del when it is where it is at.
Most modern UNIX systems have devalued the Control key anyway. Sun uses Apple's Command Key shortcuts while SGI and HP use stupid Windows ones with the same lower-left Control Key placement.
I bet if you just gave it half of the effort that you put in to that last post, you could get used to the Control key being where it is now. Better yet, you could map another really illogical spiffy key like F7 to be the Control key.
By the way, I learned UNIX by using my old Apple
-- Len