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Re: PowerMac DOS Compatibles, linux, A/UX and MAE



>>>>> "Lloyd" == Lloyd Wood <L.Wood@surrey.ac.uk> writes:
In article <31846176.7C5D@surrey.ac.uk> Lloyd Wood <L.Wood@surrey.ac.uk> writes:

    LLoyd's alter ego> "But if MAE runs on Solaris, can't you just buy
    LLoyd's alter ego> it for your Sparc?"

    Lloyd> "The 6100 is only a few hundred dollars more, and it runs
    Lloyd> PowerPC binaries. MAE looks pretty bad next to an LC475,

Ouch.  That's sad.  From a performance experience, Executor on an
entry level Pentium easily outperforms an LC475.  Executor doesn't
have the degree of compatibility that MAE has, but that's due to us
not having access to (or having looked at) the ROM and Toolbox source.
Feel free to check a demo version of Executor from our web site
http://www.ardi.com.  Executor only runs on x86 currently, but that
will change.

    Lloyd> and won't do PowerPC native apps. It's really a way for
    Lloyd> Apple to repackage and resell the neat 68K emulator code
    Lloyd> that made the PowerMacs possible, nothing more. They've
    Lloyd> made noises about doing PowerMac emulation, but never in a
    Lloyd> million years will they do it. Emulating a RISC processor
    Lloyd> with a different RISC processor is a development nightmare,
    Lloyd> and performance would just suck."

Emulating RISC on RISC *shouldn't* be a development nightmare, nor
should performance suck.  Check out ftp://ftp.ardi.com/pub/SynPaper to
see how Syn68k, our current generation of synthetic CPU, works.  Mat
Hostetter has already done significant work on a successor to Syn68k
that will be able to support PowerPC emulation on SPARCs with greater
performance than we currently get (there might be some alignment
slowdowns but there'd be no byte swapping, less register contention
and a much more sophisticated dynamic translator).

I've sent followups to comp.emulators.mac.executor.

--Cliff
ctm@ardi.com


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