x86 Mac port?

funkyass · Post by **funkyass** » Sun Feb 26, 2006 8:51 am

DAEGU wrote:I just have a G5 iMac - version 2.

I hate snes9x, it's just not the same, haha.

And yeah- I uncompressed the archive, and i just get a folder filled with files and other folders, what do i do with them?

drag them to the trash, thats pretty much all you can do with it. you need either the new iMac or MacBook Pro to even start.

DAEGU · Post by **DAEGU** » Wed Mar 01, 2006 1:32 am

I wouldn't have to 'drag it to the trash', i could always get my processor switched.

Aaron · Post by **Aaron** » Wed Mar 01, 2006 1:50 am

I thought it'd be interesting to note that the new Mac Mini features the new Intel processor.

linkage. The same price as a mid-ranged Mac Mini ($600), but now 4x freakin' faster :O!!!

kode54 · Post by **kode54** » Wed Mar 01, 2006 2:06 am

Aaron wrote:I thought it'd be interesting to note that the new Mac Mini features the new Intel processor.

linkage. The same price as a mid-ranged Mac Mini ($600), but now 4x freakin' faster :O!!!

Yeah, right.

tehnick · Post by **tehnick** » Sun Mar 05, 2006 3:37 am

Don't underestimate the upgrade. Going from a G4 to Core Solo/Duo is a huge difference. Mainly because of IBM's inability to get a G5 in a laptop or mini.

BTW, I have a new intel iMac. If you want to pagefault, I wouldn't mind giving you ssh access to develop ZSNES on OS X Intel.

Deathlike2 · Post by **Deathlike2** » Sun Mar 05, 2006 3:47 am

DAEGU wrote:I wouldn't have to 'drag it to the trash', i could always get my processor switched.

It's not as simple as you think. Maybe I'm missing something.. but you can't just "swap in a processor" of a completely different architecture and expect it to work. Linux has multiple builds for different architectures and you can't just expect that build to work under another architecture. It just doesn't work like that.

Why do you think Macs and PCs generally have few problems even when most of the components are completely different years later? It's because they use the same architecture. I forget what architecture the Macs uses, but moving them to x86 requires more than just a processor swap.. it requires an updated Mac OS X build at the very least.

Deathlike2 · Post by **Deathlike2** » Sun Mar 05, 2006 4:01 am

kode54 wrote:
Aaron wrote:I thought it'd be interesting to note that the new Mac Mini features the new Intel processor.

linkage. The same price as a mid-ranged Mac Mini ($600), but now 4x freakin' faster :O!!!
Yeah, right.

4x is completely exaggerated. Remember, this is the same company that said the P4 sucked ass years before.

funkyass · Post by **funkyass** » Sun Mar 05, 2006 4:08 am

Deathlike2 wrote: 4x is completely exaggerated. Remember, this is the same company that said the P4 sucked ass years before.

And that wasn't far from the truth.

Deathlike2 · Post by **Deathlike2** » Sun Mar 05, 2006 4:24 am

funkyass wrote:
Deathlike2 wrote: 4x is completely exaggerated. Remember, this is the same company that said the P4 sucked ass years before.
And that wasn't far from the truth.

I forget if that means you agree with me or not...

What bothered me a bit about Macs was specifically that the Mac equivalent hardware (particularly video cards) were always late to the party. The worst part was that the video cards were generally of the mid-end variety...

adventure_of_link · Post by **adventure_of_link** » Sun Mar 05, 2006 6:12 am

DeathLike: Macs are/were based off the PPC CPU's.

Clements · Post by **Clements** » Sun Mar 05, 2006 5:09 pm

Heh, the Rosetta emulation software creates a 50% or more performance drop when running PPC software on an x86 Mac.

SteveSnake · Post by **SteveSnake** » Tue Mar 07, 2006 11:00 am

Deathlike2 wrote:4x is completely exaggerated. Remember, this is the same company that said the P4 sucked ass years before.

Normally I would agree, Apple are very good at bending the truth

But this time, I could well believe it.

The Pentium M is a very surprising chip. A 1.8ghz PM easily outperforms a 3ghz P4 with everything I have thrown at it. I could well believe its more than 2x faster than an equivalent G4.

The Core Duo is basically 2 Pentium Ms - so provided your app is properly multithreaded, it should go 4x as fast easily.

Not really surprising Apple wanted it

Clements wrote:Heh, the Rosetta emulation software creates a 50% or more performance drop when running PPC software on an x86 Mac.

Hmm, from what I have read, its using Dynamic Recompilation. That should give you 80% or more efficiency - and given that the CPU is also faster, it should be pretty good speedwise. I'll have to have a play with it sometime

doom127 · Post by **doom127** » Sat Apr 29, 2006 12:49 pm

It wouldn't be the least bit efficient, but one might accomplish such a portly task on a standard PPC G5 by using Virtual PC and then one of the kludge hacks that are floating around to run the Intel OSX...

PPC G5 running OSX
\/
Virtual PC with XP
\/
OSX Boot Camp Hack

OSX on.. OSX.. muhahaa!

blargg · Post by **blargg** » Sun Apr 30, 2006 1:59 am

Clements wrote:Heh, the Rosetta emulation software creates a 50% or more performance drop when running PPC software on an x86 Mac.

SteveSnake wrote:Hmm, from what I have read, its using Dynamic Recompilation. That should give you 80% or more efficiency - and given that the CPU is also faster, it should be pretty good speedwise.

The PowerPC architecture has 32 32-bit general-purpose integer registers, and 32 64-bit floating-point registers (add 32 128-bit integer registers for Altivec on the G4 and G5). This is many times that of the x86. Any kind of execution on the x86 will require some kind of "virtual register" system and frequent swapping. Compilers often use more registers to allow better parallelism and to prevent stalling, making the emulator's job harder still.

doktor_kris · Post by **doktor_kris** » Sun Apr 30, 2006 11:08 pm

I went out to my local Mac-dealer the other day and tried out the new
x86-mini, and I must say that it ran everything I fed it of PPC programs
(mostly downloaded shareware games) from fairly well to very well.

The x86-macs seems sweet, but I´d wait for at least a year before
buying it, giving it some time to mature. :)