WinUAE: PPC Amiga Classic future emulation?

Hi!
First thanks to all people and toni for do winuae. My question is if possible on a future emulate PPC for a future working OS4 PPC Classic Amiga (A1200/A3000/A4000 PowerPC 603/604 series) with OS4 Classic Amiga shipping from ACube Systems. The idea of winuae is classic amiga (680x0 + OS1x,2.x and 3.x) but now with this new OS a new door is open and very interesting, all of before + PPC (603/604 or named G2 too) and the new OS4, for have a total and completed amiga classic emulation (68k,ppc and OS1.x to OS4.x) is a fantastic and wonderfull idea and a lot of work of course but is ...

thanks to all for reading my post and amiga roolz!!!

Cheers

[Graham Humphrey]

This has come up so many times before...

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=32739
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=27770
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=24309

Amongst others...

[Romanujan]

And this will be coming up in the future (unless you put a big red answer to this question in a place where people write their forum messages) - I think PPC emulation and OS4 support is now the most desired feature...

[Retro-Nerd]

Originally Posted by Romanujan

And this will be coming up in the future (unless you put a big red answer to this question in a place where people write their forum messages) - I think PPC emulation and OS4 support is now the most desired feature...

I don't think so that PPC emulation/OS4 support is the most desired feature, it's pretty useless. The folks want to play their old games, and JIT emulation is fast enough for all other Amiga related stuff.

[Toni Wilen]

Argh

[Romanujan]

Originally Posted by Retro-Nerd

I don't think so that PPC emulation/OS4 support is the most desired feature, it's pretty useless. The folks want to play their old games, and JIT emulation is fast enough for all other Amiga related stuff.

Search the forums, there were many requests for this feature in the past - the folks (including me) want to use the software also - just for the fun of the (well, emulated) retrocomputing. I really think that some big fat warning should be placed somewhere - otherwise people will be asking for this over and over again...

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by Romanujan

I really think that some big fat warning should be placed somewhere - otherwise people will be asking for this over and over again...

Suggestions as to where are welcome

Edit: I should also add that unfortunately most new members don't read the >> Amiga FAQ << or the Rules & Help

...anyway, getting way off topic

[Unch]

I'm currently working on a complete re-write of WinUAE that will include not only PPC, but also AAA emulation.

So far it's going well, as you can see from the screengrab below:

[Pyromania]

If this ever happened it might be via a WinUAE plug-in from a 3rd party developer, don't hold your breath though. Not an impossible task, Apple does it on Intel versions of Mac OS X. Lots of work to do it for UAE though. Might be an interesting project for someone to try if they have lots of time on their hands.

[musojon74]

How fast would an actual PPC amiga run anyway? I've never had the chance to play with one. The JIT seems to run like the crackers under WinUAE.

[pjhutch]

The biggest problem is that x86 and PPC are too different. x86 has far fewer registers than PPC. x86 has 15, PPC has about 68 registers (so 3/4 have to be swapped in/out memory at lot). x86 are little-endian (MSB at lowest address) while PPC is big-endian, so bytes will need swapping for multi-byte values which significantly reduce speed of any emulator.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/es...archguide.html
http://www.goingware.com/tips/gettin...byteorder.html

Personally only a Amiga PPC emulator can be written for PPC based systems such as the PPC based Macs, not Intel machines. Therefore a PPC emulator for Wintel machines will be too slow to be viable.

If you want to try a PPC emulator now try PearPC or QEmu to see how fast (or not) it works.

[Toni Wilen]

Registers aren't the problem (x86 has big L1 caches and also x64 has much more registers).

Much bigger problem is the MMU. PPC MMU is required and in use. JIT-style emulation and MMU emulation does not really work together.

btw, If you think non-JIT UAE 68040 is slow, PPC with much higher clock will be extremely slow..

Thanks for your replyes, i found some info in the freescale home page and of course, is very very diferent the 603 cpu compared with m68k but impossible is nothing with the work and support from all people but intel cpus sucks... the good idea, is a port of this to the xbox 360 system :P i am not friend of microsoft but this console is the best more than ps3 and of course, i love tri-core G5 and not the intel and pc busboards...
xD
http://www.freescale.com/files/32bit...eet/MPC603.pdf

Happy new amiga year to all!!!

[glue]

I think in the future, simply will be rewrite code OS 4 for X86 machines

See ex. MACOS for INTEL & AMD cpu's

[Romanujan]

Originally Posted by glue

I think in the future, simply will be rewrite code OS 4 for X86 machines

See ex. MACOS for INTEL & AMD cpu's

I don't think so - this is Amiga, the world in which the companies do not act in a sane way - in fact, they are doing whatever possible to reduce AmigaOS and MorphOS user base. And now this trial... For now the only amiga-like environment for x86 (not counting emulators) is AROS - and I don't believe it will change in the future

[derSammler]

Originally Posted by Romanujan

I think PPC emulation and OS4 support is now the most desired feature... [...] the folks (including me) want to use the software also - just for the fun of the (well, emulated) retrocomputing.

Please enlighten me. What has running AmigaOS 4.0 for Classic Amiga to do with retro-computing? It has gone Gold just a few weeks ago! That's not retro, it's more like wanting to use brand-new software for free because one can't (or don't want to) afford the money to buy the required hardware. PPC emulation is just useless.

[Romanujan]

Originally Posted by pcGTW_Webmaster

Please enlighten me. What has running AmigaOS 4.0 for Classic Amiga to do with retro-computing? It has gone Gold just a few weeks ago!

So what? The spirit of this OS is still retro... And thats probably the main reason why people are interested in it.

Originally Posted by pcGTW_Webmaster

That's not retro, it's more like wanting to use brand-new software for free because one can't (or don't want to) afford the money to buy the required hardware. PPC emulation is just useless.

I don't understand this at all. If they are some PC users that want to run OS4 without buying the expensive and hard-to-get hardware (which you seems to agree), then PPC Amiga emulation is just what they need! How can you state it is useless? It may be useless to you, but certainly NOT to the community!

[derSammler]

If they are some PC users that want to run OS4 without buying the expensive and hard-to-get hardware (which you seems to agree), then PPC Amiga emulation is just what they need! How can you state it is useless? It may be useless to you, but certainly NOT to the community!

So, would you buy AmigaOS 4.0 just to play around with it for a few minutes if WinUAE had PPC emulation? I don't think you would, nor would others. It would be more of supporting warez. People could download and use AmigaOS 4.0 for free, which is bad and certainly not what the community wants.

What else can you do with PPC emulation? Playing some PPC ports of classic PC games like Quake instead of directly playing the PC originals? That's not worth it (and ridiculous given the platform WinUAE runs on), especially since PPC emulation would be far too slow for that anyway... There's simply not a single PPC application that makes implementing PPC emulation in WinUAE worthwhile. So, I stick to my statement that PPC emulation is useless.

[Romanujan]

Originally Posted by pcGTW_Webmaster

So, would you buy AmigaOS 4.0 just to play around with it for a few minutes if WinUAE had PPC emulation? I don't think you would, nor would others. It would be more of supporting warez. People could download and use AmigaOS 4.0 for free, which is bad and certainly not what the community wants.

If there were people who bought an expensive hardware with OS4 license - I suppose a lot more would buy OS4 if they didn't have to buy expensive hardware, but could use the one they already have... Maybe i would buy OS4, maybe not - it depends on the price and availability. Even if not - I would probably use WarpOS.

Originally Posted by pcGTW_Webmaster

What else can you do with PPC emulation? Playing some PPC ports of classic PC games like Quake instead of directly playing the PC originals? That's not worth it (and ridiculous given the platform WinUAE runs on), especially since PPC emulation would be far too slow for that anyway... There's simply not a single PPC application that makes implementing PPC emulation in WinUAE worthwhile. So, I stick to my statement that PPC emulation is useless.

I would do the same I do with JIT, RTG, AHI, 68882 and Z3 Fast emulation - have a retro-computing fun Why do you think AIAB, AmiKit and AmigaSYS projects were started? Or maybe you can find useful applications for OS 1.x, 2.x or 3.x?

[Retro-Nerd]

Why do you think AIAB, AmiKit and AmigaSYS projects were started? Or maybe you can find useful applications for OS 1.x, 2.x or 3.x?

AIAB (Ok Scalos), AmiKit and AmigaSYS uses OS3.9 with 3.X applications. And they are useful.