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Dolphin Devs help with PPC Emulator?

sleep_21

New member
Hey,

Is it true the Gekko CPU is based on PPC? How different is it from the G3-G5 Macintosh CPUs? If they are similar, the work being done on Dolphin would be REALLY valuable in creating a Macintosh virtual machine.

Lots of people are interested in running MacOS and OSX on intel CPUs. If you guys have even a partially working PPC emulator, It could be very useful for this purpose.

Any thoughts?
Sleep_21
 

icepir8

Moderator
yes, it is based on the PPC. The enhancement is that the Gekko has SIMD floating point opp codes.
 

Azimer

Emulator Developer
Moderator
Also make note that the Gekko doesn't use Altivec. The Gekko needed to be cheaper.
 

Reznor007

New member
Gekko is a PowerPC 750cx chip from IBM.

Apple used Motorolla PPC chips for G4 and lower, but IBM PPC 970 for G5.

Another project you might talk to is Supermodel, which is a arcade Model 3 emulator, which used PPC 603e.
 

blight

New member
also note that darwin is available for x86, and when you want OSX - go buy a mac, it's worth it i think (still expensive tho ;))
 

CompuPhreak

New member
Azimer said:
Also make note that the Gekko doesn't use Altivec. The Gekko needed to be cheaper.

OS X doesnt need altivec to run.

Is it possible to work off of Dolphin's progress towards a PPC emulator that would support the PPC, or is the type of emulation different enough so that it would be more appropriate to start a different project alltogether?
 

tonyrayo

I Love Sushi!
Personally this sounds like it should have it's own project, but that doesn't mean the information learned by the Dolphin team cannot be applied.
 

aprentice

Moderator
The dolphin team hasnt discovered ppu emulation, its been public information for quiet awhile now, the docs are on ibms site.
 

ZDragon

New member
In fact, the Dolphin team first used code of another PPC emulator to test the emu out, then wrote their own that was faster/more compatible with the GC. And of course they also used the docs on the IBM site as well.
 

Durandle

New member
That brings back the question I asked in another thread (which was pretty much ignored) - would porting Dolphin to the Mac platform be pretty simple? In theory it should be much faster as the CPU being emulated is quite similar in many ways to the current mac CPUs.
 

aprentice

Moderator
Durandle said:
That brings back the question I asked in another thread (which was pretty much ignored) - would porting Dolphin to the Mac platform be pretty simple? In theory it should be much faster as the CPU being emulated is quite similar in many ways to the current mac CPUs.

The question was probably ignored because it is a pretty dumb question :p
The whole cpu would need a make over pretty much, so the answer to your question is obviously no.
 

ZDragon

New member
From the Dolphin helpfile:

"Feel free to donate a couple of G5 workstations for us to develop a DolphinMac on."

If the sourcecode would be released, some people could go ahead and try - the current Dolphin team probably won't.

In the end, it wouldn't be easy at all - because Dolphin currently works on DirectX. Someone would have to code an OpenGL plugin.
 

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