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.."

Re:Panther on x86?

[DiSKiLLeR]

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.

Re:Panther on x86?

[bobthemonkey13]

The "500 times slower" figure quoted was for the generic CPU emulator, too. The x86 just-in-time recompiler should be much faster, and if there's enough demand it might get ported to other host architectures (x86_64 perhaps?).

Re:Panther on x86?

[dmayle]

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...

Performance information

[Stonent1]

Here is a screenshot of me running an OpenSSL benchmark on the emulated Macintosh:
Open SSL benchmark [comcast.net]

And a screen shot of the PCI information:
PCI info [comcast.net]

These tests were run on a Pentium III 500 under XP Pro. You can recrate the test on your system by running openssl speed rsa dsa md5 and compare the results to a real pc or mac running linux.

Not everyone is behind the times

[abb3w]

Mac OS X supports the use of 2nd button for pulling up "context menus", similar to right clicking in Windows. Of course, it's the same as control-clicking with the single button mouse, but it is supported. OS X also supports the scrollwheel to some extent (behaving mostly as you'd expect), which PearPC doesn't yet.

I once asked an Apple engineer why you couldn't GET a two-button mouse when buying a new Apple. It was implied that someone "with a huge amount of control over the design process" was still adamantly opposed to the 2nd button. I wonder who....

Re:major bug

[mrmez]

I think you're confusing Apple hardware with Apple software. OS X has supported my M$ intellimouse natively for years - although with your confusion of hardware and OS, I suppose you think the mouse somehow supports itself through Windows when used on my PowerBook... ;)

How difficult would this be?

[JamesP]

I've had an idea about PPC emulation and running OS X.

What about taking a x86 "lower half" of the OS (i.e. Darwin) and plugging and emulated "upper half" (i.e. Cocoa, Charcoal, etc.) of OS X above it.

Would that be feasible?

Thanks, but no thanks

[Orion Blastar]

I run Linspire and OpenStep, easy enough for me to use and configure. No need for me to use OSX anyway.

For $450USD I can buy a very good low end PC Clone using an AMD processor at 2.0 Ghz, and an 80G hard drive, and 512M of RAM, DVD+RW drive, GeForce FX video chipset, onboard LAN, USB 2.0, Firewire, etc sans an OS and for $50USD I can buy a copy of Lindows, and use F/OSS software for the rest of it. So $500 total, and what do I have to spend to get all that with a Macintosh? $1799 for the low end G5 model. They may be worth it, but they are still out of my price range.

The iMac and eMac are underpowered for me, and not expandable enough for me.