While browsing through my favourite web sites, I stumbled upon this intriguing little program.  It claims to emulate a PPC based platform at reasonable speeds.  To back the author's claims, a reviewer on www.osnews.com has succesfully booted MacOS X on his low-spec x86 PC.  Since the emulator is open source, building an AmigaOne emulator should be relativly easy, as long as the April northbridge specs are avaiable.  Just imagine running the long awaited OS4 and your Amiga programs on your cheap, powerfull PC!  



Links below:

 http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/about.html

 http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=7085

Okay, i'll comment on this thingy.

I installed it a couple of days ago, and started to hack around with it, it is possible to install OSX ofcourse, but the speed is dog slow :-)

The Gfx and I/O performence of the emulation isn't that bad at all, but the CPU Core is lacking.

The CPU core exists atm in 2 versions, a purely interpreting core, and a Just In Time Compiler (think Amithlon's m68k core).

What most people assume to be such a big problem is the amount of registers the PPC has, this actually isn't THAT big of a problem at all, in interpretive mode it will indeed waste quite a bit of cycles (less then you might assume, as the 'registers' stay in L1 Data cache) on JIT this is only a problem when running a piece of code for the first time, after that the code will get ranslated to native x86 code (the "Just in time COMPILATION" thingy, right ? ;-) *grin* )

/ I think i just hitted a Post-lenght barrier /

Neither expect to be ever able to use this kind of emulation in the same way as the m68k JIT from UAE/Amithlon (running AmigaOS faster then on the real hardware).

But, who am i to ramble about this stuff ? i'm not developing it, so please, dont torch me down when Seppel (the main dev) miraciously gets it to 70% Efficiency.

And on my own experience with this emulator, installing OSX in a minimum install took 11 Hours on this Duron1300, yes i know, LOW end stuff and that people WILL comment on that, but still it shows that it's not performence you are getting atm

Anyway, i'm stopping with rambling now.

-- Locutus

Since the emulator is open source, building an AmigaOne emulator should be relativly easy, as long as the April northbridge specs are avaiable.

In fact its a Mai Articia Northbridge in the Amiga One, April was a chip from some other company ;-)

Has anyone installed Mac OSX 10.2? I tried but I got a strange read only error message from the install script!

And actually emulating that wont be needed at all
(just the memory map has to be the same)

The bigger problem will be to emulate uboot and the "secret os4 enabling code"/dongle in the Amiga One Bios. Besides that, everyone who wanted to run os4 emulated on x86 legally would have to buy an A1 board.

Give and take CPU power goes up 2 more Ghz or more, probably emulation speed, and a few updates and bug fixes later, will also increase. So as MATT would suggest, that this could be bad news for PPC users(including MAC users) cause the reason to buy PPC mobo will cease. Reminds me a bit like NewTek VT  and LightWave being ported to PC. The reason for buying an Amiga also was history(sadly though) :-(

Good day to all Amigans!  :-D

You have to buy a 3 GHz x86 to emulate something like a 75 MHz
Pseudo-G3. What will I need to emulate a G4 1GHz or a G5 2 GHz? And
all people now screaming that the PPC will die.