OS4.1 on Apple Silicon ?

[MartinW]

Before I drive myself insane trying for days on end, does OS4.1FE work on the latest Mac OS version and M1 chip?

I haven't used my OS4.1 disk for some time now and I can't get it to run with either 3.x or 4.x versions of FS-UAE. Just wondering if it's me or it's just not supported yet.

Was just curious how performance is on AS.

[Aulapatchuc]

OS 4.1FE is for PowerPC CPUs, not ARM.

EDIT: Forget it missed the FS-UAE part.

[MartinW]

Obviously! That would be why I'm running it under an emulator. Namely FS-UAE.

It worked back when I had an Intel Mac, can't get past the green screen of the CyberStorm PPC card now that I'm on an M1 based Mac.

[ppeter]

Yes, it does work, at least with an M2 and with an M1 Max it does.

[MartinW]

Thanks for confirming - any chance you could share some further info please? Like which version of Launcher and FS-UAE you are using and whether you are using Intel (via Rosetta 2) or Arm binaries?

I have just this minute managed to get to the boot screen of my OS4.1 disk by using the Intel binaries but the actual screen once I get into OS4 is just a corrupt mess.

[MartinW]

So, here is my update after a weekend of playing with this.

TL;DR; OS41FE on Apple Silicon may technically work but it's not great unless you have a very specific reason to bother, or I suppose the know-how and intend to improve the situation.

FS-UAE:

• Need to use Intel build. Despite this, speed is reasonable. If anyone can tell me how to use Arm binaries then I would like to know details.
• Screen resolution is limited since we cannot use UAEGFX with PPC accelerator (you can in Win-UAE). Again, if anyone knows otherwise I would like to know details *
• No easy way to share files, again due to no UAE with PPC. Same again, if you know otherwise, reply with details.
• Network speed is just about OK but every time I tried to FTP the OS4 update files the result was a corrupt downloaded LHA **

FlowerPot (WinUAE under WINE):

• Speed is poor. Like 20 minutes to extract a 40MB LHA file. This isn't a big surprise. We're running under WINE (which we know from the Steam Deck doesn't have to add an overhead), WINE is running in an Intel to Arm translation layer and inside WINE we are running an Amiga emulator with a further PPC emulation layer. Honestly, this was never realistically going to end well!
• Resolution is good (1920x1080) but screen updates can be slow.
• File sharing is easy since WINE shares the simulated drive C and also the Users macOS home directory.
• Network transfers are so slow I didn't even bother to wait for the end of the transfer of the 40MB update file so I don't know if it was corrupt or not! This could be the result of the mapped drives being involved. If I can be bothered I'll investigate further. If it is then it could also partially explain the first item on the FlowerPot list.

All in all, this was one big waste of time and money. Although I already own 4.1FE so it only cost me the price of FlowerPot which I didn't mind too much. Even though it's little more than an installation of Wineskin which I already have installed, there is a bit more to it than that and it did save me a bunch of work, so I'll let the £9 slide.

On top of this, when I had my Windows gaming PC to run 4.1FE on the end result was still only any good until you went to run something like a game. At which point lack of hardware accelerated graphics just created a nice (or not) slideshow.

The whole objective here was just to see if the raw power of Apple Silicon had helped and whether things had progressed at all in the last few years. The answer is sadly no.

There is potential for things to improve. But I don't know if or when we'll get there. I think it needs full Apple Silicon support including the QEMU PPC layer and feature parity with WinUAE in terms of the GPU and drive support. I appreciate none of these things are a small ask !

[EDITS]
* Looks like I missed a setting here. If you set `graphics_memory = 262144` then I can get 1920x1080@16bit. I wouldn't want to go any higher as slowdown is starting to present itself but 24bit colour would be nice. It will suffice for my laptop however which is 1440x900.
** There may be an updated network driver that I missed. Not sure if flowerpot installed it or not. Also Roadshow has been updated which I need to investigate since I own that too.

Updated the TL;DR; in light of these edits since I suppose it's usable.

[mikeboss]

@MartinW

have you considered trying Amiberry?

https://github.com/BlitterStudio/ami...S-64bit-m1.zip

[MartinW]

Well, the general answer to that is "No I haven't" ! But that would probably need a bit of explanation...

Generally speaking I'm not interested in Amiga emulation. I have an 68060 ECS machine that can do 100Mhz and RTG and I also have a PiStorm32 based A1200 (yes, yes, I know the CPU is emulated!). But that doesn't mean that I don't have any need for Amiga emulation. I have been working on a couple of software projects and being able to do a quick build / test cycle is very useful.

Also of course, (or maybe not of course), I cannot justify nearly £2000 for an OS4 machine which is why I am here with OS4.1FE under emulation.

Regarding Amiberry, I knew the name - had to look it up, and I did have it running on a Pi400 some years ago. It was OK but really my hardware solutions were better.

I don't want to speak bad of FS-UAE in any way. It is a brilliant piece of software but I have to say more and more I find it's heading in a direction not so much to my liking. Seems more focussed on gaming. That's perfectly fine, but less what I'm after.

So I'll take a look at Amiberry now that it works on Apple Silicon. More choice is always good.

The $1000 question though, does it run PPC and OS4.1 ? I don't see any mention of PPC or OS4.1 anywhere on the Amiberry website or the github repo.

[mikeboss]

oops, sorry! totally missed that. nope, AFAIK there's no PPC emulation in Amiberry. otherwise I think it's the most versatile option on macOS (I more or less agree with your opinion about FS-UAE). another option (again, only 68k-amulation) on macOS would be vAmiga:

https://github.com/dirkwhoffmann/vAmiga/releases

[MartinW]

Originally Posted by mikeboss

oops, sorry! totally missed that. nope, AFAIK there's no PPC emulation in Amiberry. otherwise I think it's the most versatile option on macOS (I more or less agree with your opinion about FS-UAE). another option (again, only 68k-amulation) on macOS would be vAmiga:

https://github.com/dirkwhoffmann/vAmiga/releases

It's all good!

Another one I didn't know about. Very glad there are options...

[AMIGASYSTEM]

On MAC you could use Qemu ! OS4.1 Works very well on QEmu !

[MartinW]

Well now that is VERY interesting! BUT...

That's a screenshot of 4.1 running in Qemu on Windows, umm, 7 maybe? Certainly not macOS.

Do you have any further info? Like Qemu version (on Mac), Intel or Arm, etc.

[thomas]

QEMU has just recently been updated to properly emulate a Pegasos2. It is said to be increadibly fast on ARM M1 while it is not much faster than WinUAE on x64. (I cannot tell because I don't own a Mac.)

But you cannot use the install CD you've got. You have to buy another one for Pegasos2.

[MartinW]

Originally Posted by thomas

But you cannot use the install CD you've got. You have to buy another one for Pegasos2.

Oh, nuts. Yes, I completely forgot about that

Well, we can forget about that option for the time being then.

[MartinW]

Well, after this evening I am all the more interested to hear how anyone is running OS4.1FE Update 1+ on a Mac with FS-UAE. Intel, Arm64 or some other mystery combination

My evening has more or less followed along the same path as in this thread with the exception that I managed to get Update 1 installed and running (sort of) but once I get to Update 2 I cannot boot whatever I do so I can't get to the point of trying Update 2 Hotfix.

https://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p...57&postcount=1

So, I can get OS4.1FE base running OK. It's actually not too shabby except the network is not reliable at all. Every download gets corrupted. Just to be clear, in the following account of my actions, I used a second HDF to get the update files onto OS4, I did not use the unreliable network.

I update to Update 1 and just get a pink screen on boot. There's no way round this that I can see after spending hours on it aside from reverting graphics.library.kmod and intuition.library.kmod back to the versions in the base install. You can get past the pink screen by just reverting graphics.library but you then get stuck on the OS4.1 boot logo screen.

With this appropriately hacked setup OS4.1FE UPD1 will run and you can update to Update 2. At this point even reverting those 2 files doesn't cut it. Pink screen again. I suppose I could go through the files one by one to see if there's a combination that works, but allegedly I shouldn't need to so I'm not going to.

At this point, unless someone can supply me with a magic config file I have to draw the conclusion that OS4.1FE Update 1 and above in fact do not run under FS-UAE on macOS.

By all means prove me wrong!

[Photon]

Originally Posted by MartinW

Obviously! That would be why I'm running it under an emulator. Namely FS-UAE.

It worked back when I had an Intel Mac, can't get past the green screen of the CyberStorm PPC card now that I'm on an M1 based Mac.

Changing architecture to proprietary obviously shifts the burden from the billion dollar multinational corporation to every dev who wants to see their program still run on the OS they supported for a long time.

Instead, Apple is counting on every dev spending endless time on their whims and destructive corporate decisions. If you dev for Apple, you are nothing and your time is worth nothing.

Meanwhile, an OS is for running applications made for that OS. An OS is not for child's play, like destroying support for software industry standards.

Apple's OSes should support OpenGL, and if it wants to be current, it should support Vulkan. Removing this and switching CPU architecture obviously causes problem. Should you be using Apple's OSes for emulation? They specifically ban emulation from their stores.

At the same time, I have no expectation of emulation authors to update their software. It's too much work when the corporation that seems big but by action is so very small, and pulls the rug out from under them.

[MartinW]

Originally Posted by Photon

Changing architecture to proprietary obviously shifts the burden from the billion dollar multinational corporation to every dev who wants to see their program still run on the OS they supported for a long time.

Instead, Apple is counting on every dev spending endless time on their whims and destructive corporate decisions. If you dev for Apple, you are nothing and your time is worth nothing.

Meanwhile, an OS is for running applications made for that OS. An OS is not for child's play, like destroying support for software industry standards.

Apple's OSes should support OpenGL, and if it wants to be current, it should support Vulkan. Removing this and switching CPU architecture obviously causes problem. Should you be using Apple's OSes for emulation? They specifically ban emulation from their stores.

I'll cut you a little respect since you're showing as an admin / mod, but seriously? I'm only trying to establish what works and what doesn't. I'm well aware of what's involved in porting stuff from one architecture to another which is why I'm involved in porting something to Amiga in the first place.

I don't really get most of your point(s) to be honest!

Apple's OS's should support OpenGL? Really? Says who? The OpenGL Police? I mean, I agree that it would REALLY be nice if Apple hadn't dropped the ball on OpenGL and gone their own way but that was their choice. Vulkan? Same, except as far as I know there are Vulkan implementations. No idea how current / complete / viable they are since I'm no low level graphics dev.

Originally Posted by Photon

At the same time, I have no expectation of emulation authors to update their software. It's too much work when the corporation that seems big but by action is so very small pulls the rug out from under them.

Well at least we agree on something!

All I'm asking is that I am reading, and people are saying, that OS4.1 runs on Apple Silicon using FS-UAE. This hasn't been my experience so if anyone could offer forward a working config, I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks.

[Photon]

Originally Posted by MartinW

I'll cut you a little respect since you're showing as an admin / mod

If all say what they think is true, then there is forum, else not.

Oh, you saw the badge. Don't even think of ban. I've seen members get banned for the likes of link spam, and then sometimes there's personal attack in the heat of passion which needs care.

I will say what I think is true however, as anyone. You will get no grief from me for saying what you think is true.

Originally Posted by MartinW

Apple's OS's should support OpenGL? Really? Says who? The OpenGL Police? I mean, I agree that it would REALLY be nice if Apple hadn't dropped the ball on OpenGL and gone their own way but that was their choice. Vulkan? Same, except as far as I know there are Vulkan implementations. No idea how current / complete / viable they are since I'm no low level graphics dev.

No, not any police, nor anyone pulling the offended card. It's about something completely different.

Yes, every current OS should support these two (OpenGL and Vulkan), because both are established, and extremely useful graphics APIs for modern CPU, GPUs, and monitors. OSes should run software and support standards. Tons of software can be ported if you support them.

I think Pegasos support is missing because it used to work when Apple supported standard graphics APIs, and now it will take a dev to support Apple instead, to support it in Metal (on selected Apple platforms only, since they've not bothered to port it to others).

[MartinW]

Just fill me in on the only part of your ramblings that I have any interest in please.

Does a CyberStormPPC accelerator card use a Pegasos chip / cpu (whatever it is - though I assumed Pegasos was the motherboard, not the CPU)? If so, ok, great. If not, what are you going on about?

I'll just repeat again, I was simply asking if anyone had OS41FE classic running on Apple Silicon with FS-UAE. I'm told the answer is yes, but for me it won't work. So I'm just looking for some pointers to a config where it works. Be that using intel binaries through R2 translation (most likely) or directly through Arm binaries. At the point I can get it to run and boot then I can evaluate whether in 2023 it's worth using it or whether the CD should just go back on the shelf for a few more years.

Note that I've not asked at all about running Pegasos anything on an Apple machine. Someone else suggested it works well, but that was purely a suggestion, not something I've actively pursued because I don't own a Pegasos2 install CD for OS4.

Sheesh! Way to derail a thread!

[fl@sh]

For OS4.1 on PC/MAC M1 look at here:

https://www.amigans.net/modules/newb...post_id=139977