Slashdot Mirror
PowerPC Architecture Emulator Unleashed
Sebastian Biallas writes "We have finally released version 0.1 of our PowerPC architecture emulator: PearPC. The emulator itself is (prepared to be) architecture independent but only tested on x86s (here you go porters...). It also features a must faster just-in-time compilation unit for x86 hosts. This means that you can now run your favourite PowerPC-OS on x86: Mandrake Linux (9.1), Darwin (6 + 7) and Mac OS X (10.3)! And the best things is: it's GPL'd.
But be warned: it's experimental.."
Yes, i was getting really excited too.
:(
;).
But i just read the website. Its 500 times slower than the real thing
Oh well. Guess the previous posters are correct. Apple won't go after this project as
its next to useless. Infact, it might be a good thing. It lets people try out and play
with MacOS X before they commit to buying all that expensive hardware. (Nevermind the
legal issues of course.)
When I was first trying to make the decision to buy a mac, spending 5 minutes or 30
minutes "playing" with it at the store wasn't enough. I wanted to spend several days
on it, using it to do all the things i do now, but in a different enviornment. You
can't do that in the shop.
So i ended up borrowing a friends crappy old imac (which only ran OS9) and chucked a
priated copy of OSX 10.1 i downloaded of the net.
Loved it to bits, and promptly bought my PowerBook G4. (And then that cube of ebay
So, i spose, this emulator will give people the ability to try out MacOSX and run it
to do day to day stuff, albiet very very slowly. Its a well known fact Microsoft never
went after software pirates in the old days so that their software become so
widespread it became the standard. Perhaps this might work for Apple, too.
D.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
The x86 is just really poorly suited to emulate PPC, the PPC has more registers and they're all general purpose, as opposed to x86's small groups of purpose specific registers.
While that may be true, modern emulation techniques take this into account with things like JIT compilation. While an instruction-for-instruction emulation scheme will have performance problems, the same program compiled in C on respective platforms will run with equivalent speed. The program just needs some time to mature for speed.
Me, I plan to try and get onto the list of developers to port to x86-64. Simple emulation should be much easier thanks to the larger register file on AMD's chips...