Bridgeboard emulation (x86 CPU, for example A2286)
 

What about adding Brigdeboard PC Card emulation to WinUAE ?

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Ok, I am joking ;-)

Giuseppe Chillemi

PCI bridge emulation is actually planned. Someday as usually.

It isn't that stupid idea, there may be useful PCI/PCI-e hardware implementations in other open source virtual machines that can be used with PCI bridge emulation in Amiga emulation.

I think Giuseppe meant emulating some of those boards which have got a real x86 on it (like the A2286).

I suppose QEMU should make that kinda easy to do? :D

Ok, that kind of emulation is getting close to being more than most pointless way to emulate old x86 programs.

Don't need QEMU, some much simpler and much much much less complex x86 emulator should be more than enough to emulate some max 10MHz pre-386 x86 CPU.

Biggest technical issue is, as usual, lack of hardware information. At least there was some PPC board information available (From Linux and NetBSD) but I don't think anyone wanted to reverse-engineer those bridgeboards.

Stupid, pointless and very possible. Maybe. Someday.

Come on ! Re-enacting the 1985's Amiga world premiere would be awesome. ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWiOVa1R4m0
(Starting from 10:00)

You can already do that, the premiere IBM emulation was done with Transformer.

How about PCEM http://pcem-emulator.co.uk/ as a base for the bridgeboard? Could be as good as a GoldenGate Vortex one...

Finding optimal PC/x86 emulator is the very last problem to solve.

IO/memory mappings from both sides of hardware is needed first. (What hardware Amiga side sees and vice versa). I don't think this information is easily available. (as usual).

Isnt the documentation and CPLD code of the Prometheus board open?

One thing i wonder what use it would be though.

Ofcourse you could use existing code for NE2k, CL or S3 VGA, Ensonic audio, PCI-Serial. But all of those are covered by Zorro board emulations.

And writing a PCI VSA100 or R200 emulation does not sound appealing :-P

x86 bridge boards, not PCI. I also misunderstood it first. Title edited :)

No but some other open source virtual machine/pc emulator may implement something useful in the future.

The A500/A2000 Technical Reference Manual has some info starting on page 109.

This site contains bridgeboard stuff too: disk images, Janus sdk, some documents,...

Technical reference seems to include everything needed to emulate it. (I have had those manual scans for ages but I forgot about bridgeboard info, probably because it is was so uninteresting..)

Of course it is not going to happen any time soon.

If it's as anytime soon as ppc emulation that's good ;)

"Any time soon" is now proven to be about 6 months.

That's still faster then 'Just 2 more weeks' (-:

Seeing this gives me perverse satisfaction. :-D

Wow, thank you very much Tony Wilen ! :D
It is very nice to see that you have already come so far !

Can you say us what exactly works and where the emulation fails ? Maybe some people owning the real hardware may help you (e.g. finding the real hardware addresses) !

It is proper native emulation in emulation experience!

Above screenshot was first test run that didn't fail during bios hardware diagnostics, x86 code wrote something to display ram, Amiga-side code handled it properly and was converted to Amiga window.

For example floppy controller is totally unimplemented, interrupt stuff is not complete, configuration jumpers are not fully decoded. Too early for debugging.

Anyone have Sidecar/A2088 compatible installed MSDOS janus "hardfile"? :)
(Floppy controller emulation is too boring task, maybe later..)