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virtualizing native processors

Submitted by catmistake on August 1, 2007 - 12:54am. PowerPC Macs

On the intel macs, you've heard, we have Parallels, which virtualizes x86 hardware at full speed because the actual real processor's in the x86 family.

Is there PPC emulator software that virtualizes PPC hardware (on a PPC) at near full proc speed? Is this what the Classic environment does sorta? Any chance of hacking anything but OS 9 in Classic (like PPC netbsd or PPC ubuntu)?

Also, I thought I heard QEMU has PPC emulator software (as well as a ton of other processor emulators), but I haven't seen anything myself.

I want to virtualize os's on my PPC... but I don't want to emulate x86 because its so slow doing this with PPC, so I'm hoping there's a way to virtualize, say, a G4 on a G4.

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Yes, there is a program calle

Submitted by Anhaedra on August 1, 2007 - 10:39am.

Yes, there is a program called Mac on Mac that does that.

» Mac Pro 2Ghz 2GB RAM X1900XT 320GB HD 160GB HD 40GB HD 10.4.7 Sceptre 20.1inch widescreen LCD | Pismo 400Mhz 256MB 10GB HD 10.4.1 | Power Mac G3 400Mhz 640MB RAM 18GB SCSI array Rage 128 10.4.7 | Athlon 64 3000+ 1GB RAM Geforce 6800GT 120GB HD 80GB HD XP

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Eudimorphodon's picture

MoM

Submitted by Eudimorphodon on August 1, 2007 - 2:08pm.
Anhaedra wrote:
Yes, there is a program called Mac on Mac that does that.

Mac-On-Mac was a quicky hack to Mac-On-Linux which was never finished and isn't really in a generally usable state on OS X. (No networking, for instance.)

Mac-On-Linux is actually pretty good, but using it means running Linux as your host OS. (OS X works fine, if somewhat sluggishly due to the video requirements, as a *guest* OS.)

--Peace

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Jon's picture

Heh, the last time I used MOL

Submitted by Jon on August 2, 2007 - 9:26pm.

Heh, the last time I used MOL was running it on YDL on a Beige G3 with 96MB of RAM. I then booted an OS X 10.2 image on 64B of RAM in MOL. It wasn't snappy, but it worked - and it emulated a NewWorld machine, on OldWorld hardware. Eye-wink On anything newer with more RAM, I'd expect it to be usable, other than video issues as you mentioned. Using MOL is one way to get Flash "working" on PPC Linux. It's kinda a goofy way to do it, but until Adobe gets around to a Linux PPC release...

» I am not in this world to live up to other people's expectations, nor do I feel that the world must live up to mine. - Fritz Perls

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Does MOL compile in OS X?

Submitted by Anhaedra on August 14, 2007 - 9:46pm.

Does MOL compile in OS X?

» Mac Pro 2Ghz 2GB RAM X1900XT 320GB HD 160GB HD 40GB HD 10.4.7 Sceptre 20.1inch widescreen LCD | Pismo 400Mhz 256MB 10GB HD 10.4.1 | Power Mac G3 400Mhz 640MB RAM 18GB SCSI array Rage 128 10.4.7 | Athlon 64 3000+ 1GB RAM Geforce 6800GT 120GB HD 80GB HD XP

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Eudimorphodon's picture

Re: Does MOL compile in OS X?

Submitted by Eudimorphodon on August 14, 2007 - 10:03pm.
Anhaedra wrote:
Does MOL compile in OS X?

MOL FAQ entry.

"Can I run MOL on OSX?"

Not at this time, but most of the MOM patches have been integrated back into the source. An OSX port is likely for the future.

You could always try checking out the code and making it work yourself.

--Peace

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catmistake's picture

classic, sheepshaver, Q

Submitted by catmistake on August 19, 2007 - 7:10am.

what's weird about all the old mac emulators... they all assume you want to emulate a mac running MacOS.

So... aren't these true ppc MACHINE emulators?
Why can't I load any OS I want to into classic, sheepshaver or ppc_Q?

Why can't Classic/Sheepshaver/Q boot some OS other than MacOS... like YDL, NetBSD, BeOS, or any other PPC native OS... like OPENSTEP or... OS X ?

:(

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Eudimorphodon's picture

What's weird?

Submitted by Eudimorphodon on August 20, 2007 - 5:49pm.

The reason most of these emulators only really *support* MacOS is because that's all anyone who's writing them is interested in running. However, to be pedantic Mac-On-Linux (which is a genuine "virtual machine"), QEMU, PearPC, and gxemul (which are all emulators) *are* capable of booting things which arn't MacOS. (Mac-On-Linux can run PPC linux < 2.4, QEMU and PearPC run Linux, and gxemu handles both PReP and MacPPC builds of Linux and NetBSD.) That seems like decent coverage to me.

I'm sure if someone wants to contribute the code to run BeOS or Rhapsody inside one of them they'll be happy to accept a diff. Pick the one that comes closest and start reverse-engineering.

--Peace

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