E-Maculation News: June 2004

Anonymous writes “You will surely have heard of PearPC, but do you also know SoftPear?

The SoftPear Project aims to create compatibility software between the IBM PC and the Apple Macintosh architecture. The PowerPC to i386 recompiler works with many small test programs. The code is in the CVS.

http://softpear.sourceforge.net/

The project's goals include software to be able to

A) run Darwin/PPC executables, including Mac OS X, its libraries and its applications, on Darwin/x86 (using emulation/dynamic recompilation, like “DR Emulator” or “FX!32”)

B) run Darwin/PPC applications on Linux/PPC (by adding a compatibility layer, like FreeBSD's “Linux Binary Compatibility”

C) run Mac OS X/x86 applications on Linux/x86 or Darwin/x86 running Mac OS X

D) have a reimplementation of the Mac OS X operating environment under the GPL license (like “WINE”)

This way, * an IBM PC can be used as if it was an Apple Macintosh (using an original Mac OS X license) * Mac applications will run on Linux (using an original Mac OS X license) * Mac applications can be recompiled for the PC (using an original Mac OS X license) * a free version of Mac OS X will run on a variety of computers”

— ClockWise, June 1, 2004

There is a really cool looking PearPC Installer/Front-end being discussed in the forum over here. Check out the website over here. I haven't tried it myself yet, so I am a little unclear about the feature set.

— ClockWise, June 1, 2004

The SDL version of PearPC has a Windows version. Download it over here. Also, check out the forum thread over here.

— ClockWise, June 2, 2004

Also, Bob McGee's PearPC GUI is seeing a fair bit of updating these days. Get the download, and see the screenshots over here. You can chat about it in the forum in this thread.

— ClockWise, June 2, 2004

First: The superb PearPC Front is subject to another release. Download it over here, or talk about it over here.

Second: For reasons of bandwidth, Bob McGee's excellent PearGUI has a new home. Download it over here. If you need a hand hosting some PearPC related thing, give me a shout in the forum.

— ClockWise, June 4, 2004

Due to heavy traffic requirements, nilss' PearPC SDL downloads have been moved to Richard Goodwin's webserver. Our thanks to Mr. Goodwin for his generosity.

You can now find the source and Windows build at

http://www.richardgoodwin.com/pearpc/sdlbuilds.php

— Jackalo, June 4, 2004

Someone asked Kevin Smith on his message board if he had seen any episodes of the new Degrassi series. He replied that he had seen the pilot, and was trying to get tapes of the series so far. And then he wrote this cool bit:

“I also told Pat (Joey Jeremiah) that I'd love to write and direct and episode. Got a call from one of the producers of the show, but I lost the number. When I get back to the States, I'll try to track the number down, though - 'cause I would love to do an episode.”

So cool.

— ClockWise, June 5, 2004

Hey, here is a link to a great guide (in PDF) format to increasing the size of your hard disk image in PearPC. The guide was uploaded to the forum by “Tekmaven.”

— ClockWise, June 6, 2004

This was already posted, but it was, um, removed, so I'll mention again that a few days ago, there was an updated version of the very keen PearGUI application. Download it over here. The file, which I believe is also included in a number of optimized distributions of the emulator, has been downloaded from this website 1628 times over the last week.

— ClockWise, June 12, 2004

Over at Richard Goodwin's site you can download a nightly build of PearPC with a version number of .3. One forum dweller calls it amazing, while Mike Kolassa points out that “[a]ccording to the CVS tree, the only difference is that line 22 in /src/info.h was updated to show '0.3pre' instead of '0.2pre'.”

— ClockWise, June 12, 2004

A new version of PearPC SDL, now at pre0.3, has been posted over at Richard Goodwin's site. This new version sports a win32 clock patch, as well as the SDL graphics code. You can snag the new release over here.

Thanks to litghost for the heads up.

— Jackalo, June 12, 2004

I missed this when it happened, but noticed it just now thanks to a post by Jim Watters on his forum.

Anyways, on the SheepShaver development list, Gwenole Beauchesne wrote the following:

“Since CVS stabilised, I placed convenience sources (CVS snapshots) + precompiled binaries at: this site.”

The changes since the last snapshot are as follows:

- Minor improvements to the generic JIT engine. SheepShaver now performs at around 1/8th of native speed.

- Make JIT generated code “reentrant” thus speeding up 68k audio processing a lot.

- Add Native QuickDraw acceleration routines for BitBlt (srcCopy), FillRect.

- Add TUN/TAP device support. Try to make ethernet support code little-endian and 64-bit clean.

- Add run-time depth switching code from Basilisk II. It now supports 1 bpp to host screen depths.

- Add “idlewait” option so that SheepShaver doesn't eat up all CPU when MacOS is not doing anything.

- Add experimental “jit68k” option to enable MacOS 68k DR emulator.

- Better fullscreen DGA support.

- Correctly setup XPRAM for first-time users.

— ClockWise, June 13, 2004

The venerable PearPC.net has a fancy new look. Meanwhile, PearPC.us has come into existence.

Now, you have no reason to visit this site. Degrassi High and Sybille Bedford related news postings will follow.

— ClockWise, June 14, 2004

Annnnd, you can finally download an official release of PearPC 0.2.0! Check out the official site for the scoop.

Developer Sebastian Biallas notes:

“The most important change of this release is certainly that network now also works with Windows as host. Since we now have conditional redraw code, you can take a smaller redraw interval without dramatic speed decrease. With this release, you can switch the screen resolution (i.e. the size of the window) at runtime via the video.x driver. Note that there are some small config file changes, so please update your config file from the shipped ppccfg.example. Read the full changelog for all changes.”

— ClockWise, June 15, 2004

The mysterious and enigmatic “Blue Misfit” wrote me to say that I should point out that Richard Goodwin's site is now hosting a new PearPC SDL patch.

Goodwin describes it like this:

“New SDL patch with modified source directory structures, waiting for inclusion into CVS. Includes clock fixes. Uses hardware surfaces in fullscreen and outputs stdout to stdout and not a file.”

Get it over here.

— ClockWise, June 18, 2004

Over on Jim Watters's Forum, SheepShaver developer Gwenole Beauchesne just wrote:

“…as of a few minutes ago, MacOS 9.0.4 now works in SheepShaver.”

More as it comes…

Edited to add: Er, I didn't bother to read my own forum, where this has already been posted. “ShadowFox,” popularly known as the guy who sees what evil lurks in the hearts of canine wildlife posted this bit:

“Just got an email update through the BasiliskII mailing list- SheepShaver has been updated in CVS to support up to MacOS 9.0.4!!”

Keep watching this space.

— ClockWise, June 20, 2004

A screenshot of SheepShaver running MacOS 9 is available over here!

— June 21, 2004

Our comrades over at http://www.pearpc.net/PearPC.net have enlisted a few new forum moderators. That site is also sporting some impressive usage statistics and milestones. Be sure to http://www.pearpc.net/check it out.

Meanwhile, I'm not sure I introduced this site's new(ish) moderators. We've got “Cybermagellan” handling the hard work in the busiest folders, with “CaptainValour,” “Kybernaut” and “Stephen Coates” handling the rest of the stuff.

— June 21, 2004

Kevin Smith, the writer behind “Clerks,” “Chasing Amy,” and a number of other high profile film comedies has chimed in on his greatest regret in life - passing on a chance to appear in the pilot for Degrassi: The Next Generation. On his forum yesterday, he wrote the following:

“'Degrassi' is/was, without a doubt, one of the ten best things television has ever produced. If you combined 'Saved by the Bell', '90210', 'The O.C.'… even the oft-highly regarded “My So Called Life”, you still wouldn't approximate the quality of the worst episode of any 'Degrassi' incarnation.

I've spent the weekend catching up with 'Degrassi - The Next Generation', thanks to the absurd amount Noggin re-runs it and TiVo. It, too, is so insanely good. Now that they've brought back Caitlin Ryan (thus extending the decades-long star-cros't storyline of the Joey Jeremiah/Caitlin Ryan romance) and added the awesome Ellie Nash character, the show ranks up there with 'School's Out' - the two hour 'Degrassi' tv movie from '91 (which, along with 'The Office' Christmas Specials, is the finest two hours of television I've ever watched).

One of my biggest regrets in life is not being able to appear in the pilot of 'The Next Generation.' They asked, but I was knee-deep in 'Strike Back' press at that point. And to make it worse, I would've been playing Caitlin's boyfriend. I would've been part of the Caitlin/Joey epic!

This weekend, my love affair with 'Degrassi' has been rekindled in a big way. I want to go direct an episode (though writing and directing an ep would be nicer).

Word on the grapevine is that they're releasing 'Junior High' and 'High' on DVD this year. Anyone else hear that?”

This commentator is very exicted about the possibility of a Degrassi DVD release. Check out Smith's original post over here.

— ClockWise, June 22, 2004

Forum member TheRealJobe just wrote a really great guide to setting up PearPC. It has screenshots and everything. Check it out here.

— ClockWise, June 22, 2004

Anonymous writes “The specifications for the Xbox 2 (Xenon) have been anonymously leaked from Microsoft. Here is the quote from Xbox Scene (The biggest and best Xbox Modding website.)

“Basic Hardware Specifications Xenon is powered by a 3.5+ GHz IBM PowerPC processor and a 500+ MHz ATI graphics processor. Xenon has 256+ MB of unified memory. Xenon runs a custom operating system based on Microsoft® Windows NT®, similar to the Xbox operating system. The graphics interface is a superset of Microsoft® Direct3D® version 9.0.

CPU The Xenon CPU is a custom processor based on PowerPC technology. The CPU includes three independent processors (cores) on a single die. Each core runs at 3.5+ GHz. The Xenon CPU can issue two instructions per clock cycle per core. At peak performance, Xenon can issue 21 billion instructions per second. The Xenon CPU was designed by IBM in close consultation with the Xbox team, leading to a number of revolutionary additions, including a dot product instruction for extremely fast vector math and custom security features built directly into the silicon to prevent piracy and hacking. Each core has two symmetric hardware threads (SMT), for a total of six hardware threads available to games. Not only does the Xenon CPU include the standard set of PowerPC integer and floating-point registers (one set per hardware thread), the Xenon CPU also includes 128 vector (VMX) registers per hardware thread. This astounding number of registers can drastically improve the speed of common mathematical operations. Each of the three cores includes a 32-KB L1 instruction cache and a 32-KB L1 data cache. The three cores share a 1-MB L2 cache. The L2 cache can be locked down in segments to improve performance. The L2 cache also has the very unusual feature of being directly readable from the GPU, which allows the GPU to consume geometry and texture data from L2 and main memory simultaneously. Xenon CPU instructions are exposed to games through compiler intrinsics, allowing developers to access the power of the chip using C language notation. …” There are more specs here.

Xbox 2 is intended for release in late 2005. With the things you can do on a mod-chipped Intel-based Xbox today (basically anything), it's only a matter of time untill a Microsoft-labelled computer may be able to boot a big Mac. (Unthinkable!)”

— ClockWise, June 23, 2004

Anonymous writes “Matthew Martin had earlier archived the MACE project's released source code and now he is reportedly re-releasing the code for development. As you may recall, the MaceHQ website and downloads went off line [ macehq.cx and macehq.cjb.net ]. Soon, they will be up again for all who want to contribute. And if you did not know, MACE is a LGPL-licensed software execution layer (not unlike Wine) for the 68000-series processors. no rom is necessary and Mac OS applications run using standard windows widgets.”

— ClockWise, June 23, 2004

ShadowFox wrote this bit in the forums the other day:

“Haven't seen it posted anywhere else yet, but yesturday a few CVS changes were committed to begin initial support for SDL.

Eventually this could pave the way for a much easier Windows port of SheepShaver, as SDL is known for it's cross-platform compatibility. I believe the first changes made were to the graphics subsystem, to ween the display off a reliance on X.

It's still got a ways to go, but it's great to see progress! Thanks Gwenole!”

Check out the original thread over here.

— ClockWise, June 25, 2004

PearPC China is translating some of the news from this site. Worthwhile, if you don't read English very well.

— ClockWise, June 27, 2004

Forum member “vu1tur” has written an application to convert compressed dmg images to iso format, which will make using PearPC easier for some of you. Check out the pertinent forum thread for more details.

— ClockWise, June 27, 2004

Not sure I understand what this means, but one forum-dweller posted the following today:

“found this:

Hi,

With this patch, you will have (VERY EXPERIMENTAL and ONLY PRELIMINARY) support for a REAL PCI cards from the QEMU guest OS.

This patch is for Linux OS as a host, and the kernel needs to be patched.”

The scoop can be located over here. The forum thread is over here.

— ClockWise, June 28, 2004

I decided that I would post some personal information about myself just to give some information and let some of the posters know who I am and my background and history. Feel free to post and I'm hoping that the other moderators will join as well. This post is located here.

— schristopheraz, June 29, 2004

Oh, Nice…..Yes ladies and gentlemen we have a start. Prasys has managed to get OS9 to at least attempt to load on PearPC in classic mode

Basilisk, SheepShaver, Move on over theres a new guy in town!

Check it out here.

— schristopheraz, June 30, 2004