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mbpark · 09-02-2002, 12:59 PM

Apple's had this for years.

Darwin for x86 has been downloadable for a while (www.apple.com/darwin).

It's not that hard to port Aqua over to x86, apparently. From what I've heard, Nvidia's provided the video drivers. This means, if Apple did this, it would be done on THEIR x86 hardware. There's no way you're going to run this on your generic x86 box.

However, the best choice, due to the extra registers, would be the AMD "Hammer" architecture. They've apparently done ports to the P3, P4, and Athlon (someone did a Strings dump of their DVD player and found directives for compiling for those three architectures), and the Hammer has the extra regs they could use to make something like Altivec work somewhat half-assed.

Remember back in the 68K days, when they made products like Emplant for the Amiga, which actually used Mac ROM chips and a lot of custom hardware to make Mac OS run on an Amiga 2000, 3000, or 4000? It actually was faster than the 68K Macs, due to the fact that Amigas had a better architecture. However, it was a pretty large add-in card with a lot of extra logic, plus custom software to run the Mac in a "sandbox" on Workbench. It had to emulate darn near everything to make MacOS boot, and by placing most of that code in ROM, it worked really well. It's still a testament to good code that the Emplant developers got it to work as fast as they did.

People STILL use them to run Netscape on their Amigas, since that platform has everything but a decent web browser (amIRC, YAM, ixemul [UNIX emulator library like Cygwin], NewsRog, and a ton of other utils).

The only way you'll get this to run on an X86 is via something like an Emplant for PC. Since PC hardware is that much more complicated these days, I foresee it being pretty messy.

If Apple has it, it's running on an Nvidia chipset, more than likely with an AMD Athlon MP, with a lot of extra information there, and a specialized BIOS and bootloader. In other words, you'll be able to get it to run on a PC, but it will take serious work as they've probably put a lot of chipset and video-card specific code in there.

They did do it with MacOS 9 on LinuxPPC, and SheepShaver, but it wasn't easy.

Mitch

09-02-2002, 12:59 PM	#5
mbpark Lecturer Join Date: Jan 2001 Location: Carmel, Indiana Posts: 761	Actually, AMD Hammer sounds good Apple's had this for years. Darwin for x86 has been downloadable for a while (www.apple.com/darwin). It's not that hard to port Aqua over to x86, apparently. From what I've heard, Nvidia's provided the video drivers. This means, if Apple did this, it would be done on THEIR x86 hardware. There's no way you're going to run this on your generic x86 box. However, the best choice, due to the extra registers, would be the AMD "Hammer" architecture. They've apparently done ports to the P3, P4, and Athlon (someone did a Strings dump of their DVD player and found directives for compiling for those three architectures), and the Hammer has the extra regs they could use to make something like Altivec work somewhat half-assed. Remember back in the 68K days, when they made products like Emplant for the Amiga, which actually used Mac ROM chips and a lot of custom hardware to make Mac OS run on an Amiga 2000, 3000, or 4000? It actually was faster than the 68K Macs, due to the fact that Amigas had a better architecture. However, it was a pretty large add-in card with a lot of extra logic, plus custom software to run the Mac in a "sandbox" on Workbench. It had to emulate darn near everything to make MacOS boot, and by placing most of that code in ROM, it worked really well. It's still a testament to good code that the Emplant developers got it to work as fast as they did. People STILL use them to run Netscape on their Amigas, since that platform has everything but a decent web browser (amIRC, YAM, ixemul [UNIX emulator library like Cygwin], NewsRog, and a ton of other utils). The only way you'll get this to run on an X86 is via something like an Emplant for PC. Since PC hardware is that much more complicated these days, I foresee it being pretty messy. If Apple has it, it's running on an Nvidia chipset, more than likely with an AMD Athlon MP, with a lot of extra information there, and a specialized BIOS and bootloader. In other words, you'll be able to get it to run on a PC, but it will take serious work as they've probably put a lot of chipset and video-card specific code in there. They did do it with MacOS 9 on LinuxPPC, and SheepShaver, but it wasn't easy. Mitch