Re: Linux / Kegs on a Mac

[Phoenyx <quazar@dcnet2000.com>]

Hi Dain,

You bring up an interesting point. Unfortunately, it's not as easy as it
may seem. It's true that many of the GNU utilities and libraries have been
ported to Windows and this may help to ease the process. There are other
problems to deal with. For example, the whole sound subsystem would need
to be redesigned. You would also loose the low level disk i/o which IMHO
is one of Kegs best features. On top of that, the video output would also
need to be rewritten. It is not an easy task due to the significant
differences in the way the two OS's function.

Have you tried the latest incarnation of XGS/32? Since Steve Mentzer took
over the development, it has come a long way. In fact, it finally gives
users of Windows a quality GS emulator. It still requires a recent PC
to get a decent speed from it, but GS emulation is very resource
intensive.

As for developing GS emulators, on any platform, it is mostly a 'labor of
love'. There was only a limited development effort for the Windows
platform and this was only a port of earlier XGS code. All things
considered, I think Steve has done an excellent job of debugging and
reprogramming on the current version and should be applauded for his
effort.

You have to consider that the Windows OS restricts many of the program
methods best suited for this type of application. This is inherent in it's
design. After all, it is designed to keep the programmer from having to
resort to low level coding by allowing a program to call system routines.
While this may work for a large variety of applications, it fails on an
emulator which is cpu intensive and often requires timing critical code.

While I can't vouch for Bernie or Sweet 16, I know that Kegs has been
supported by it's author for quite some time. Kent has put a lot of time
and effort into expanding and debugging it as well as debugging faulty
GS programs (usually games) so they will run on it. The Windows GS
emulators have not had that kind of support.

At first, XGS was ported to Dos and Win32 (NT) and for a little while it
looked like PC users were going to get a chance to emulate the GS. At this
point, all GS emulators were still in the early stages of development.
Even Kegs, which at this point was largely restricted to the HP work
station it was developed on. Then XGS development on the PC stalled out.
Luckily, Steve decided to take over the development of XGS/32 and, well,
the proof is in the programming. You just have to try it.

As I have mentioned many times, Kegs is my favorite emulator. However,
this is not because of it's interface. In fact, Kegs has very little
interface of it's own. When you execute the emulator, you get the GS
window and several lines of program info below that.

To make the best use of Kegs, you have to take advantage of the 
multitasking capabilities of the *nix oriented OS (ie Linux, Solaris,
etc.) and X. For best results, you run Kegs from a terminal. This allows
you to see any error messages and interact with the built in system
debugger. It is much more technically oriented than XGS, but that's the
price one pays for the power. While Kegs is running, you can easily edit
it's disk.conf file and change disk images on the fly. Kegs will react
just like a real GS when you change or eject it's disks. One advantage
over the real GS though, Kegs will let you change images in slot 7.
Essentially, all disk images are removable. Whether this is a feature or a
flaw is subjective.

I would also like to see Kegs ported to other systems as long as it does
not lose it flexibility, much of which comes from the *nix style OS it
was designed for. This is the main reason I originally posted about the
Linux and PowerPC (Mac) option.

As an aside, you can learn some interesting information about how a GS
program is functioning by using the Kegs debugger.

-- 

Cheers and best wishes,
Phoenyx

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