maconlinux.org

This is an emulator that seems to work good on PPC. was wondering if any people who can program would like to try and port this to the x86 system?

This would make running some games made for windows/Max Os easier for us linux nuts .
But then again I'm not sure how hard it would be to transfer it to x86 systems??


Anyways

Cya laters

Well as they mention on that site, they don't do any kind of CPU emulation to make it work. The only way to get this to work on a PC would be a hardware emulation layer that emulated one of the processors this supports (603, 604, G3, or G4). I won't go as far to say it is impossible... but it would probably be horribly slow to emulate a PPC processor on an x86 processor.

It would be painfully slow. All calls to the processor using its native instruction set would have to be re-interpreted to a x86 instruction set, or emulated set. The PPC is a risc processor at its core and the x86s are cisc processors. You'd have to re-interpret all the risc instructions as cisc instructions and that would make your P4 act like a late 1980s era MAC II,... if that good.

Currently, doing emulation of DOS on x86 architecture yields you an emulated machine that is about 3 generations behind in terms of architecture, and that is within the same family of processors. A P4 2.4 GHz machine, for example, can emulate fairly well a 33MHz 486 machine. So,... do the mental math.

Check out PearPC. It runs Mac OS X on x86 -- at about 1/100th the speed. But that should be enough for some games (turn based).