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Transplanting the Mac’s Central Processor: Gary Davidian’s 68000 Emulator (2020)
- rbanffy 4y agoWow! What an amazing story! I never imagined MacOS ran on AMD29K and 88000’s.
- joshu 4y agoIIRC PowerPC was the merger of the Power architecture with something close to the 88k's signaling at Apple's behest.
- musicale 4y agoApple has done a remarkable job moving the Mac from 68K to PowerPC to x86 to ARM over the course of three decades. Their latest static-translation based emulator (Rosetta2) is pretty cool as well. The CPU world seems like it was a lot more interesting in the early 1990s, with Apple creating native versions of Mac OS for 68K, x86, and PowerPC – and running Mac OS in emulation on 29K and 88K (on Apple hardware prototypes) as well as on SPARC, POWER, and PA-RISC (on Sun/IBM/HP workstations.) Shame that Apple didn't try making an ARM-based Mac back then as well - though they did use ARM chips in the Newton.
- SomeHacker44 4y agoThey are helped by non-standard extensions to the basic ARM architecture of their CPUs (i.e., Apple proprietary extensions), such as harmonizing the memory models of x64 and ARM.
- dang 4y agoRelated: Transplanting the Mac’s Central Processor: Gary Davidian’s 68000 Emulator (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28914208 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28914208 - Oct 2021 (21 comments)
- tambourine_man 4y agoAs soon as I submitted this link I thought I remember doing it before. Thanks
- dang 4y agoJust to be clear, the repost was quite ok because the previous thread was over a year ago. (This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.) I just link to previous threads because curious readers sometimes like to look at the old comments—that's all!
- OnlyMortal 4y agoHaving ported a 6502 emulator to MacOS 8 (to play C64 SID music), I found this rather interesting. Thanks for posting this.