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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.."
This means that you can now run your favourite PowerPC-OS on x86: Mandrake Linux (9.1),
Why not just run it natively on the x86 architecture?
They won't have to. It's going to be dog slow, to the point of uselessness, especially if you actually try to run OSX on it.
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. You can try to minimize the drawbacks from this with a JITC, but it's still going to crawl compared to the real thing.
If you read the website this guy is not claiming to have a working OSX environment. He clearly states the the emulated PPC rus 500 times slower than the host. This is just a cool program in very early beta. Besides, he has screenshots of the initial stages of and OSX install, which is pretty nice for version 0.1.
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.
This is actually not the first PowerPC Mac emulator for x86. SheepShaver has been able to run PowerPC Mac OS (only up to Mac OS 8.6, not OS X) for some time now. It's from the developer of the excellent Basilisk II emulator.
Hopefully, the two projects will collaborate and help improve the performance of the emulator until it is usable. 1/20th of actual CPU speed would be acceptable.
Does anyone know how it compares to QEmu (http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/)?
"QEMU is a FAST! processor emulator using dynamic translation to achieve good emulation speed. "
"News
(May 8, 2004) QEMU version 0.5.5 is out. (Changelog). Much improved Windows 98 support. VGA support in PowerPC PREP target.
(Apr 26, 2004) QEMU version 0.5.4 is out. (Changelog). This is the first version which is able to install and run Windows XP (experimental). This is also the first version which is able to boot a PowerPC PREP Linux kernel on a PC."
Try Corewar @ www.koth.org - rec.games.corewar
From their docs: PearPC currently only supports two-button mice (i.e. middle-button click and the scrollwheel will be ignored).
:)
They are going to have to figure out how to disable that second mouse button if they want to truly emulate OSX.
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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...