PPC Emulators To Debut at MacWorld Tokyo

jx100 writes: "I've been following the Mac emulation community for awhile, and, apparently, Mac PPC emulators are about to be unveiled for the PC. Emaculation.com says that Microcode Solutions and Emulators Inc. are planning on showing their emulators at MacWorld Tokyo 2002."

Apple's reaction?

[sammy.lost-angel.com]

I could see it going two ways. One, very opposed to it, cease and disist orders all over the place.

Or, more likely, they will be completely silent about it. This would make sense from their point of view, suddenly people could start trying out OS X on their PC's. It won't be full speed or offer all the solutions that it will on a mac, but it will give people a really good "preview" of what they might be missing.

Re:Why so long?

[Anonymous Coward]

"but it seem like it should be easier to emulate a RISC architecture with a CISC instruction set than the reverse."

I don't quite see this. Emulating CISC on RISC should be comparatively easy, since you could just translate every CISC instruction into a specific group of RISC instructions. Going the other way around seems way more difficult, since there are many different groups of RISC ops that are functionally equivalent to one specific CISC op, so you'd have a hard time correctly identifying such groups in a program. Worse, there might be RISC ops in a program that just don't happen to be grouped in a form that translates into a specific CISC op at all, so you'd have to translate each one of them into a (unnecessarily complex and slow) CISC operation indiviually (-> overhead). Also, whereas emulating the limited x86 register set on the PPC should be pretty straightforward (with the possible exception of the FPU register stack), emulating the PPC's 32 GP registers on a processor that only has 8 of them is probably significantly more difficult.