Can a Power PC-based Amiga emulate a Power PC Macintosh?

I'm not sure this is the right forum for this but I'd like to be able to view some of my old Macintosh CD-ROMs.

I have Macintosh ROMs from my Emplant software, but I would like to be able to read my Macintosh files and CD-ROMs on a new Power PC-based Amiga

@mdcatdad
Quote:
I've never tried it but maybe this:
Basilisk 2 from OS4Depot

@mdcatdad

You can use MacOnLinux, not sure how well it runs, we do not have anything similar for AmigaOS4.
Basilisk II and SheepShaver is technically the same source code however, SheepShaver did run on MSDOS, can be run in DOSBOX perhaps, but I guess it will defeat the point.
On AmigaOS4, you pretty much stuck on 680x0 MacOS7.6.1 or MacOS8.x. as far as I know MacOSX requires a more advanced emulator then MacOS9. MacOS9 can perhaps be made to run, but you need a simple JIT compiler, something to virtualize the address space, so that does conflict with host OS. Basically, it only needs to emulate the reads and writes, everything else can be passed on unchanged.

And believe you need to hack branches and return from jumps. To jump into the correct JIT cache block. Illegal opcode can be used, not sure if needed, changing opcode somewhat easier, as does not change codes relative position, however. All that is nice but will there is register conflict with host OS that’s the next question, so basically it can be done, but it’s not without challenges.

If there will be register conflicts, then there will be more code changes needed, to the JIT cache.

Difficulty somewhere between medium to extremely difficult, time consuming, perhaps not worth it, high level of uncertainty.

If someone did it however, then the same code, can perhaps also be used in EUAE, to improve support for Biazzard PPC / CyberStorm PPC. GameCube etc.

The “dolphin” code does have PowerPC interpreter, advantage of using a interpreter, is it won’t conflict with the host OS, it can be a short cut to getting MacOS9 running, disadvantage it will run lot slower, can’t take advantage of native opcodes.

https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin ... /Core/PowerPC/Interpreter

IFusion PPC I believe...?

In the past there was

https://pearpc.sourceforge.net

But the project is abandoned

@Reynolds

No, this won’t work, you need prepare emu or simulate patch, to move AmigaOS3.x out of the way. This patched won’t work on AmigaOS4.x

IFusion never supported real cdroms drives, it only worked with raw cd images. Perhaps flat.device can work, but I never tried.

@LiveForIt

I know someone did a Mac on Amiga that was based on Mac on Linux, back in the early 4.0 days, but I never got it working, and I don't even know where my copy is. I suspect it would only work on an A1 G3/4

Hi All,

It would be great if we could efficiently run PPC Mac OSX
software... Essentially anything that would run up through
OSuX 10.4.

I'd always heard about and even bought Jim Drew's iFusion, yet
never heard of a single, solitary person that could ever get it
to run.

Does that mean it isn't possible?

Obviously Mac-On-Linux was able to work somewhere; but without
loonix memory protection, I'd imagine it would blow up AmigaOS
if it could be compiled to native.

So is there any MacPPC emulator that does it's own housekeeping
in house (!!) that would work? Sheepshaver?

It would even be helpful progress if the Basilisk - the 68K Mac
emulation - could be made to either use SANA (like Shapeshifter
did so well) or could access the RAM Disk without blowing up.

It's a pity that my 30 year old 68K 4000 ran MacOS stuff way
better than (a Mac or) my X5K.

It would be great if that could be fixed.

Thanks,

PJS

By PowerPC based Amiga do you mean an AmigaNG machine or classic with PPC card? On an AmigaNG you could install Linux on it and run MacOnLinux. I don't think MacOnLinux can be ported to AmigaOS as it uses KVM which is a Linux kernel feature. It might be a challenge to find a PPC distro that still supports those machines though and still has MOL so maybe it would need to be an older distro which again might be hard to find now.

@balaton
Quote:Finding old AmigaNG Linux PPC distros is no problem at all, only finding current ones is...

https://sourceforge.net/projects/amiga ... ux/files/linux-image-old/ includes mol-kmods_0.9.73-2_powerpc.deb and mol_0.9.73-2_powerpc.deb

if you are speaking about pure emulation all PPC or X86 or Arm can emulate a PPC Mac... you need Qemu and you can have it on all systems.

If you are writing about Virtualization or paravirtualization only 603 or 604 "amiga" can virtualize a PPC Mac but the host os have to be linux. If i remember good only AmigaOne Xe and Pegasos 2 can run Linux with MOL.

PegXMac was the name of the Mac PPC emulator back in the days for Pegasos and AmigaOnes motherboards

@pjs

Quote:

Not 100% sure why its not working, but have a feeling its due package drop, due to overhead of the emulation, if we some get 68K jit compiler in there it can help a lot, I was not able to, maybe some one else can.

Basilisk II is so old code; this makes it not so easy to back port latest CPU emulation.

@tlosm

As most PowerPC is have some level of backwards compatibility, you should be able to handle the difference with JIT compiler, and it should not require full code change.
the difficult parts will of course branches, and addresses. And perhaps whatever missing instruction, & ABI conflicts.

@balaton

Quote:

Year ago now I actually tried to port MoL to OS4. I spent some time getting it to compile and was going well at one point sorting out dependencies like ncurses. However, I found out that I had only got the configure interface to compile stage and not the real code, so I gave up after that. Would have been nice.

As to KVM, MoL only used KVM in later releases. Before then it used the MoL modules which needed to exactly match the kernel version. This gave me great annoyance as I always had mismatches with whatever the popular error was. KVM was better as less rigid on kernel version. But I could never get it to fully work. I had PegXMac working on my A1/XE. But on the X1000 was really hoping to use modern MoL KVM build. But none of the pre-built packages worked for me. And I couldn't get working version compiled. Forget why. One of those works for other people but not me scenarios, so I just gave up on it.

I did want to produce a mini installer once for A1 Linux that installed MoL. I was even hoping to miniaturise as much as possible so that it would have been possible to install it to the boot partition as a ram disk and avoid needing it's own partition. Then it would load up and auto configure the drives. So it didn't need to be configured unless needed. One of those ideas.

@joerg

Quote:

You can find them but you can't install most of them! For example all the Linux ports to the Sams are net-installs and useless. PPC repos go dead after a short while. This is one reason why I produced both a full install and net install CD for Debian Jessie on the A1. I wanted to install Jessie to a friends Sam but all the installers don't work. I tried to play around and redirect it to a working server but it just didn't work so I gave up.

@Hypex
Quote:deb http://archive.debian.org/debian jessie main
deb http://archive.debian.org/debian jessie contrib
deb http://archive.debian.org/debian jessie non-free
deb http://archive.debian.org/debian jessie-backports main
deb http://archive.debian.org/debian jessie-backports contrib
deb http://archive.debian.org/debian jessie-backports non-free

Of course all keys are expired and you have to use
in /etc/apt/apt.conf

@joerg

Debian 8 is a bit of an old distribution
Of the current distributions AdelieLinux under PEG2 2/A1 is available.

https://www.adelielinux.org

Under X5000 from what I saw someone made it work: https://forum.hyperion-entertainment.com/viewtopic.php?f=58&t=4800
I checked by switching the chroot to the "rootfs" version and it works under QEMU PEG2/A1
It has built packages under ppc without alitivec.
The only issue is that there is no Linux kernel built to work on these systems.

It would be useful to have a live system on Peg2 and A1 to check the operation of the hardware. It's not always possible to diagnose on AOS4.
Even just to back up a disk with an AOS4 system or run the system with XFCE ( from what I have seen on YT on a mac g3 and they are very happy with its performance)

I've been playing with it recently (under QEMU) and I hope something will come out of it (that's why I recently posted information on the forum about kernel 4.19 under PEG2)

edit:
maybe something will be "longterm: 5.15.164 2024-07-27" on PEG2 also works

@joerg

Thanks. I likely need that last line for apt. I don't recall the errors as it's been a while. But it always got stuck on something and I spent a good night researching it and testing. Would have been less time to retrofit the Sam install image into my installer image I reckon.

@smarkusg

The Debian ISOs used to have Pegasos support. Which made it easier. In theory it could even be possible to rebuild the installer with the Debian boot script or execute the commands to load kernel and ramdisk from an Adelie CD.

The last stable kernel for the A1 is 3.16 as on here. However there is also a 4.0 kernel. Might be experimental.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/amigaone-linux/files/linux-image/

Yes. Debian Jessie may be a be a bit old now. But it at least it boot out of the box on an A1!

Unfortunately, with broken cache coherence, acceleration cannot be used on video cards. So the user experience is poor. Or slow rather. It can be enabled and it's smooth fast. For the 5 seconds it can work without freezing.

Adelie itself working on X5000 looks a bit experimental. The PPC CD image may be built with HFS, if it's Mac only, but I didn't see any evidence it lacked ISO9660. In any case, the CD image only has a few files, the grub boot loader and files, with the rest being kernel, initrd and a big squashfss.

Adelie website doesn't give much info I can see. While it's good and rare to support ppc32 and ppc64 in BE. They don't give obvious information such as kernel release. Or what drivers are supported on Desktop. PPC Linux is notorious for having poor video drivers and even when Mac PPC was still supported by Ubuntu it didn't always boot out of the box. And later Radeon drivers are only good for PPC64LE since BE support was depreciated.