Emulators (was Re: How viable are Cocoa flamewars)
Emulators (was Re: How viable are Cocoa flamewars)
- Subject: Emulators (was Re: How viable are Cocoa flamewars)
- From: "Kenneth C. Dyke" <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2002 11:48:54 -0800
On Saturday, January 26, 2002, at 09:33 AM, Ondra Cada wrote:
Sandy,
Sandy Martel (SM) wrote at Sat, 26 Jan 2002 12:25:16 -0500:
SM> Anyway, everyone know that classis does not emulate the cpu but it
sure
SM> does emulate other part of the hardware.
'Course. Just like, say, Aladin those ages ago did -- it was a very nice
_EMULATOR_ of Mac, which run on ATARI ST, exploiting the advantage of
having
the same CPU to make it run there almost as well as on a real machine.
Actually, first three years or so of my using Mac the actual hardware
below
was from ATARI ;))))
Actually, the way most of the Mac 'emulators' worked on the Amiga and
Atari ST were more akin to a "hostile port" of the Mac ROM to a new
piece of hardware (including patching out the bits that talked to the
hardware), rather than trying to emulate the Mac hardware such that the
ROM would work unmodified. The fact that the Mac ROM was forced to
work on a non-Apple piece of hardware doesn't seem to be much different
than Apple having made a new Mac ROM for a new Apple piece of hardware,
legal issues aside. ;)
Classic works in much the same way, except that instead of the ROM image
being ported to a new piece of hardware, it's sitting on top of another
OS instead. Arguably there is no real 'emulation' (software or
hardware) going on in that case. It would have been a lot different if
Classic was trying to run a Mac ROM designed for a real piece of
hardware and some other part of the system was taking CPU traps to fake
out hardware accesses to registers and such.
-Ken
Kenneth Dyke, email@hidden (personal), email@hidden (work)
Sr. Mad Scientist, MacOS X OpenGL Group, Apple Computer, Inc.
Java: The blazing speed of SmallTalk with the simple elegance of C++.