Re: [B2-devel] BasiliskII on SGI freeware page

[Brian J. J. <bjj...@ya...>]

(Sorry this is from the wrong mail account. I'm away from my usual
Internet access.)

--- Gwenole Beauchesne <gb...@di...> wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Nov 2001, Brian Johnson wrote:
> 
> > I've made BasiliskII 0.9-1 (31052001), built and packaged for
> IRIX,
> > available from the SGI freeware page:
> >
> >   http://freeware.sgi.com/index-by-alpha.html#basiliskii
> 
> Cool. ;-)
> 
> You might probably want to add the following as well, just in
> case...
> 
> However, you still need a copy of MacOS and a Macintosh ROM image
> to use
> Basilisk II (of course MacOS and Mac ROM are not included in this
> package).

Actually, it already does:  click on the package name, and you'll get
an excerpt from the README file (I think that's where it's from)
listing BII's features and some IRIX-specific caveats, along with the
stadard "you need a copy of MacOS and a ROM image" message.

> This makes me reminder that I still have to check the FPU emulation
> issues
> for Mips and Itanium processors... Talking about the Itanium, we
> use it
> with 16K pages so the video update code is probably now suboptimal
> on that
> kind of configuration. How big are pages under Irix in "standard" ?

4K on the smaller desktop machines (Indy, O2), 16K on the bigger
machines.  I've done most of my testing on the "bigger" machines, and
my development box falls in that category.

> Do you have decent screen update performance ?

Yes, it's quite good.  Using XShm, the video performance reported by
Speedometer is on par with the CPU performance, and it "feels" quite
snappy as well.  I'd say that the basic CPU emulation performance is
the probably the bottleneck on IRIX.  If we can't have a full
dynamically recompiling emulator for MIPS, it would be nice to at
least get a portable emulator which does some basic liveness analysis
of register and condition flag values, so it can avoid calculating
useless values (isn't this what one of the commercial Mac emulators
(Executor?) does?)

(Now, if I were really helpful, I'd point you at a GPLed emulator
which does that already....  Unfortunately, I don't know of one.  Oh
well.)


=====
Brian J. Johnson

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! GeoCities - quick and easy web site hosting, just $8.95/month.
http://geocities.yahoo.com/ps/info1