PPC Emulation in UAE

Hi,

Is anyone currently working on incorporating PPC emulation into UAE?

The idea being to run PPC Amiga software on UAE as you would on a real Amiga with a Blizzard/Cyberstorm PPC card attached, with a view to running OS4 inside UAE sometime in the future?

If not does anyone have any thoughts on the complexity of integrating PPC emulation code from PearPC into UAE?

Thanks

[BippyM]

nope not happening.. ever nada!.. nothing Toni is not interested

[alexh]

The code for PearPC and WinUAE are open source. Get coding.

Originally Posted by bippym

nope not happening.. ever nada!.. nothing Toni is not interested

Ok, thanks for the reply. Using search I found similar posts, but just wanted to see if this was still the case.

I'd like to have a shot at this myself, more for fun than anything and I'm not expecting to get results anywhere close to running OS4 or Warp3D. I'm a C# and Java developer but I'd like to try this as an exercise for getting my head around C code and working with lowlevel emulation routines.

Firstly I need to learn my way around the WinUAE source and then understand how PPC code executes on a real amiga and how the context switches are achieved to PPC.

Can anyone provide me with links to documentation about this? e.g. Is there a documentation project for the WinUAE source, and did Phase V release a PPC SDK with documentation?

Thanks

[Romanujan]

There is a lot of PowerPC documentation here:

http://www.power.org/resources/reading/
http://www-01.ibm.com/chips/techlib/techlib.nsf/products/PowerPC_603e_Microprocessor

AFAIK the 603e was the fastest PowerPC used in Amiga accelerators (I don't know if this was the one with the widest instruction set, but you should ba able to figure it out rather quickly). In case you do not want to implement the PowerPC emulator by your own, download QEMU:

http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/

As far as I remember, it contains some documentation or even examples about how to quickly setup your own virtual machine using on of the QEMU's emulated CPU.

As for integrating this into WinUAE - of course emulation of the full hardware card would be the best option (we could run MorphOS and AmigaOS 4), but even the WarpOS support would be great. I think I have seen some WarpOS documentation somewhere on the net, I will have to look.

As for the WinUAE source code documentation - have you ever seen so large project with well documented internals? You will have to study some code by yourself, but I think you can always ask Toni or Evilrich for help.

Good luck

[Romanujan]

Ha, here it is: complete WarpOS API documentation:

http://utilitybase.com/ref/?action=L...ncgroup=WarpOS

Originally Posted by Romanujan

Ha, here it is: complete WarpOS API documentation:

http://utilitybase.com/ref/?action=L...ncgroup=WarpOS

Hi,

Thanks for the reply. I did some digging last night and found quite a bit of stuff to. I've got the latest version of WarpOS and PowerUP which have full APIs in AmigaGuide. Ideally I need to see the source code for the ppc.library/powerpc.library/warp.library to fully understand how they talk to the PPC board. Source is not available for these so I am going to play around with some disassemblers/decompliers and see if I can make sense of the output.

WarpOS also has information on writing hardware drivers which are used by the HAL. In the case that I can't get the information I need about how the CyberstormPPC/BlizzardPPC boards work, I will implement PPC emulation in UAE however is easiest then write my own WarpOS driver. This will have the downside that only WarpOS will run, and OS4 is won't work, but hopefully I won't have to go down this path.

After I've learned all I can about how the Amiga talks to the PPC my next step will be to go through the IBM documents on the 603e in detail and get a good understanding of this processor. Once that's done I'll get started on looking at PearPC and Qemu and see which has the best PPC emulation code I can extract. Understanding UAE and trying to integrate the PPC emulation code will of course be the big task, but I think its perfectly possible.

Lots to do but should keep me occupied for a while. I'm currently "on the bench" at work which means the company is waiting for more successful project bids on application development projects to provide a new role for me. Until that time I have some time to kill so will start hacking away. :-)

[alexh]

Originally Posted by Romanujan

AFAIK the 603e was the fastest PowerPC used in Amiga accelerators

Cyberstorm PPC is a 604e

[HenryCase]

Won't help with PPC emulation, but you might want too check out Wazp3D for 3D support:
http://thellier.free.fr/Wazp3D.htm
http://aminet.net/package/driver/video/Wazp3D

[Minuous]

@Beakster:

I might be willing to help out with this, PPC emulation seems to be the most important missing feature. Of course, Win98 would have to be supported as one of the target platforms for our fork.