Re: PowerPC GS?

[cdeschu@nyx10.cs.du.edu (Chris Deschu)]

In article <3ac29c$4jd@news.service.uci.edu>,
Trangdaithi Hoang <thoang@orion.oac.uci.edu> wrote:
>In article <bran0097.784957345@maroon.tc.umn.edu>,
>Kathleen Branin <bran0097@maroon.tc.umn.edu> wrote:
>
>>	With the power pc from mac currently, you could probaly write a 
>>//gs emulator that would work faster than your current GS, since the thing 
>>is basicaly emulating a 486, or 68000 now anyways, i dont think emulating 
>>a 65c18 would be all that more above...  video might be a trick though...
>
>I have my doubts that a PowerPC based IIgs emulator can match the
>performance of a real stock IIgs.  I have seen the Apple II+ emulator
>(STM?) running on a 40 MHz 68040 Mac with 66 MHz PowerPC processor
>card and it's a dog.  I think you would need at least the new 110 MHz
>PowerMac 8100 to get any decent speed out of the IIgs emulator.  I'm
>more interested in an emulator that can at least match the speed of
>a Zipped up IIgs running at 14-15 MHz.

	I've seen and used STM on a PowerMac 8100. It was slow, it
said it's speed was about 1.2mhz max, but if you were doing anything
in the background, it dropped to like 0.8mhz.
	However, keep in mind that STM is not a "fat" powerpc type
application. It was written on and for a normal 680x0 macintosh, and
when you run it on a powermac, you are emulating an emulator. There
was a "restrict speed" menu option, so it must be able to run too
fast on some kind of macintosh. Also, even though the PPC macs are
supposed to run as fast as the Quadra series in emulation, that is
assuming many toolbox calls, which are in native code in the ROM.
For straight assembly code applications, such as STM, and some games,
the powermacs are actually much slower in their emulation.
	I imagine that if STM was recompiled for the PowerMac, it would
run quite a bit faster (I would guess like an 8mhz zip?) I hope they
do it, but first they need some interface tweaking, such as saving disk
changes to files instead of just memory, 65c02 emulation, and 128k.
-- 
___________________________________________________________________________
 |___              Chris Deschu                       cdeschu@nyx.cs.du.edu
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