Dolphin making progress.. someone just MIGHT want to have a look at this

[Samuel Rydh]

On Wed, Feb 04, 2004 at 02:10:38PM +0100, Karosa Alabaster wrote:
> Hi everyone.
> 
> Today I read
> 
> Breaking news from IRC on the Gamecube emulator for Windows known as
> Dolphin. F|REs just announced the website which features a screenshots
> section showing many games running, even some at full speed !
> http://www.dolphin-emu.com/screenshots.php
> 
> Gamecube = IBM PPC 750cx
> That means?
> They finally made a workable ppc emulator?
> Someone should either crush my hopes again or tell me that this is useable
> for coding a mac/ppc emu.
> Remember last time someone said that this emu will probably never run
> games.. Well it does.. miracles do happen.
> Anyone with knowledge over the subject should check this out.

Well, the problem is not emulating the (user level) PowerPC instruction
set. This can be done without (that) much trouble, and the
resulting speed could be decent.

The problem is emulating/virtualizaing the MMU. This is
quite tricky. Unless one uses the hardware MMU, performance
will be relly bad. There are also a lot of corner cases that
one has to address (alignment issues for instance).

For the purpose of emulating the gamecube, one probably does not
need to bother with the MMU (everything almost certainly runs
using an 1-1 mapping).

To run MacOS, one really needs the MMU. Well, I guess one could
get MacOS 8.6 (possibly Mac OS 9) running (with virtual memory off)
if one hacked around a bit, but there is no way Mac OS X will
run without full MMU support. At least not if one goes the
virtual machine path (as opposed to an API-level emulation).

/Samuel