Munich now Open Source

[Gurm]

Originally posted by Nowhere
Gurm, I'm still curious, on what SNES emulator were you working?

Two. One was a never-released threaded emulator, with synchronized threads emulating the various chips. Would have been great but nobody had any interest in a DirectX emulator back in ... 1995/6.

And the other was the emulator by Savoury Snax. You may recall its name, but he changed it a bunch of times so I don't.

- Gurm

[dbdg]

Wine is an emulator, even if it was bundled with the distro.

It is emulating the Windows OS, at a certain level anyway, no matter what you say. The sys requirements for Photoshop or whatever prog say Windows OS on the box, not WINE.

[Nowhere]

Little search - and it turned out to be SNEeSe - one of the few still evolving SNES emulators.
And on the 3rd place in ranking I think.

Apperently pretty good, although my personal favourite always was Zsnes

[Gurm]

The big problem with the SNES was that the technical documentation was largely incomplete.

We knew MOST of how the memory addressing worked.

There were one or two people who knew how the rest of it worked, but those people were notoriously tight-lipped... like "we're not gonna tell you, n00bs", even after their own projects got discontinued.

So a lot of bigger games, or games that used advanced extensions, were notoriously difficult to program.

Add to that the fact that a lot of the emulator programmers refused to use Windows API's at all (no directx, no windows sound, nothin')... and you have a recipe for a nasty situation.

Emulation is still a weird subject.

Certain systems have no emulation at all, and then BANG there's an emulator, which works better than 50%, from some nobody in France that you can't get ahold of and never releases any updates.

It's a quirky scene.

- Gurm

[leech]

Here's the way I look at it. And this actually will fit the Wikipedia definition of Emulator.

Let's take for example, UAE. It Emulates the 680x0 architecture (Architecture meaning the CPU type, for instance x86 is an architecture, as is Alphas, MIPS, etc.) It also emulates the platform/OS (In this case Workbench). It doesn't really emulate the ROM inside the Amiga, because you need a dumped ROM from the official Amiga.

Wine does NONE of this. It wraps Win32 API calls onto Linux library calls. That's it. It doesn't emulate the Kernel of windows in the least. It tries to load up some DLL files (Either builtin to WINE or the Native windows ones.)

Windows NT/2k (XP?) If I recall, are POSIX compliant (at least I read that at some point in time, somewhere) which should essentially mean that any POSIX compliant software should run under it. Would this be called Emulation? Since POSIX software wasn't written FOR Windows.

Leech

[Marshmallowman]

hmm, so installing the compatabilty update on win2k is installing an emulator?, so you can run win3.1/win 95 software...damn MS they never told me I was using an emulator!!

Wine does not replace api calls or code, it reroutes them....it is a compatabilty layer. The OS's have enough similarity, and linux is flexible enough to do this.

Hmm does the intel 64 bit CPU emulate the x86?

If you are running posix, in theory you are running under the same "virtual machine" , very similar to i wine in away, ecept its the other way around.

[Gurm]

We could argue about whether the 64-bit cpu emulates an x86 or not... LOL. The PowerPC certainly emulates a Motorola 680x0.

API wrappers are a form of emulation, no matter how you look at it. Black box emulation, sure.

- Gurm

[dZeus]

latest developments on the München Linux Migration project:

http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,62236,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_6

[Paulr]

There is so much irony and funny things about the "update" to this story I urge you all to have a read.

[Wombat]

Originally posted by Marshmallowman

Hmm does the intel 64 bit CPU emulate the x86?

Yes and no. Itanium has its own x86 core on board. However, a software emulation was also developed, and it's fast enough that later Itaniums will not have the hardware x86, they will devote the silicon to making the chip faster as a whole.