E-Maculation News: May 2004

New poll!

The “best letter” poll was getting ridiculously popular, so I closed it down with “z” beating “a” by a margin of 159 votes to 153 votes. I also shut down the “best local website” poll, with The Jenny Girl winning by a fair margin.

The new poll asks which 90s rock album is the best!

I picked one album from each year of the decade. Nothing is too obscure, since obscurist polls are stupid.

The nominees are:

1990: “Bossanova” by The Pixies. This is not a very good Pixies album. It bares mentioning that my hero Warren Kinsella says that “the world ended when the Pixies released 'Doolittle.'” Yeah, 1990 was a weak year.

1991: “Nevermind” by Nirvana. 1991 was a good year! I had to leave Pearl Jam's “Ten” off, since it came out in the same year. My dear brother says that “Ten” was the only good album Pearl Jam ever released. So sad.

1992: “Automatic for the People,” R.E.M. So “What's the Frequency, Kenneth” didn't hit until 1995's “Monster,” by this one is pretty good. I recall an article in some magazine that suggested that if Kurt Cobain had lived, Nirvana would have released an album that sounded exactly like this one.

1993: “Exile in Guyville,” Liz Phair. Almost a perfect album. “Fuck and Run” is brilliant. Phair was supposed to have contributed an original song for “Jersey Girl,” but I didn't hear it.

1994: “Vitalogy,” Pearl Jam. Here's Pearl Jam! This was a weak year.

1995: “Foo Fighters,” Foo Fighters. Here's our man Grohl. I'm not a big fan.

1996: “Pinkerton,” Weezer. I voted for this one. I love this record to bits. Not really as lyrically strong as “Guyville,” or even “Nevermind,” but it has buckets of mood.

1997: “OK Computer,” Radiohead. Fucking hate this record. So overrated.

1998: “The boy with the Arab Strap,” Belle & Sebastian. Yeah, whatever. Weak year.

1999: “The White Stripes,” The White Stripes. It is reassuring that the White Stripes released their debut album in the 1990s, just as it is comforting that Nirvana debuted in the 1980s.

— May 5, 2004

Seen on Slashdot, and submitted to the site twice in the wee hours of the night:

“We have finally released version 0.1 of our PowerPC architecture emulator: PearPC. The emulator itself is (prepared to be) architecture independent but only tested on x86s (here you go porters…). It also features a must faster just-in-time compilation unit for x86 hosts. This means that you can now run your favorite PowerPC-OS on x86: Mandrake Linux (9.1), Darwin (6 + 7) and Mac OS X (10.3)! And the best things is: it's GPL'd. But be warned: it's experimental.”

This is a big story, though it bares mentioning that the emulation is noted to be about 500 times slower than the real thing.

Over here are some screenshots.

You can talk about it over here, in the forum.

— May 10, 2004

Some chatting about the emulator going down over here on AquaSoft]], here, on NeoWin, and here, on Jim's forum]].

Meanwhile, Mike “Jackalo” Kolassa contributes a screenshot, and gives this frank assessment of the emulator:

“Can't do:

1) Anything under MacOS 10.3 2) Sound 3) Networking (on Windows) 4) Go faster than 10MHz

Can do: 1) Install PPC OS's 2) Crash after OS 10.3 loads with a kernel panic”

In a tantalizing note, SheepShaver developer Gwenole Beauchesne suggested over in the E-Maculation Forum that there are a couple of other PPC Emulators in serious development as well:

“…I had thought two other projects would have be released first: the one from Charles Mason (unnamed) and SoftPear (Michael Steil et al.). I really did not know about PearPC.”

SoftPear is located, of course, over on Sourceforge.

In an unrelated note, E-Maculation's favorite crank wrote me to report the news, and included this gem:

“Why doesn't this feel nearly as special as it should have? 5 years ago, this might have been cool. Right now… well… I'm typing this from a mac…”

More as it comes. If you want to e-mail me some screenshots or tips, feel free to do do so right here.

— May 10, 2004

Mike Kolassa wrote a short step-by-step guide to installing PearPC. You can check it out over here. It ought to show you how to create usable CD Images from your OS X disks. It also includes a few screenshots.

Mike also wrote the superb SheepShaver step-by-step that has been viewed eleven thousand times.

Mike writes with a whole lot of clarity, which is really great for those of us who can swing an A- in classes about obscure Canadian poets, but can barely pass “Intro to Computer Science” after four years of university.

God, I'm such a joke.

Also, you should check out that NeoWin thread that I linked to incorrectly in the last item. It includes a whole bunch of great screenshots of OS X installing (slowly) under PearPC.

Additionally, OSNews has a news item and comment thread about the emulator, as does the developers section of Slashdot and the venerable AquaXP.

It's big news! I'm going to try out Mike's guide tomorrow night and report back here with the results.

— May 10, 2004

No luck on this end at the moment. But I'm trying, really.

Meanwhile, we've set up a nice PearPC folder in the forum. It is seeing a fair bit of traffic. Lots of help is available.

It seems that MacOS 10.2 does install under PearPC, and forum member HDC posted nine screenshots in this thread.

Also, reports indicated that the JIT version of PearPC (get it here), is only 40 times slower than the real thing.

Finally, Toshimitsu Tanaka e-mailed me some screenshots that you can see on his (non-English) webpage over here.

More as it becomes available.

— May 11, 2004

I got so excited about the PearPC story that I forgot to mention that on May 10, the same day as the story broke, that this website turned five years old.

The site started sometime around May 10, 1999.

Waybackmachine archives are located here for 2000-2003, here for early 2000, and here, for 1999.

See - it only took five years to get to this point. Patience is a virtue. <p> Thanks for visiting

—- May 11, 2004

So maybe everyone is all about the PearPC at the moment, but Gwenole B. just posted a few words about an update to SheepShaver on the Basilisk II development list. Here's the scoop:

New changed committed recently to CV include: -TUN/TAP device support for networking. TODO: the tunconfig script could be arranged so that a DHCP server is set up on the tunX interface thus enabling users to only configure MacOS with a DHCP client.

-Ethernet driver fixes for litt-endian & 64 bit platforms. I have not tested the new code on x86/amd64 yet but it still works on PPC. I also introduced Mac_sysalloc() and Mac_sysfree() for allocating stuff in MacOS system heap zone, and therefore ensuring allocations under 32-bit address space.

-I have disabled MacOS → X11 cursor tracking as I noticed it sometimes disappears with e.g. MS Internet explorer or simply TextEdit fields. However, you can still be re-enabled by setting Unix/video x.cpp (mac_cursor_enabled) to true.

Thanks to James “Jim” Watters for the news. His Mac Emulation Form is hosting some talk about PearPC as well. In fact, everyone is - PearPC is the talk of the town. Also, Mark Nadene slept with his second cousin. People are talking about that too.

— May 12, 2004

First: Your humble webmaster is now, finally, in the process of installing Mac OS X under PearPC. I gave up on installing 10.3 (nothing seemed bootable), and instead am using 10.2. It seems that the install will take a long time. Screenshots when I get 'em.

Second: If you want to skip the Darwin steps listed on the main PearPC page, you can download a formated bootable hd to install 10.2 onto right here, and one for 10.3 right here. Each file is about 7 KB to download, and unrar to the appropriate size ( around three gigs). A big thanks to Cat_7 for preparing them. I am using his 10.2 image right now.

Third: Forum member “jazzman” posted a couple of cool screenshots over here. He's hoping that PearPC is elected president this year, and I think he might be on to something. Also, he estimates that the speed of the PearPC on his machine is in the neighborhood of 1/15 to 1/20 the speed of a real Apple machine.

Fourth: The Dutch love PearPC. As do the Something Awful forum goons. The SpyMac evangelists are not so enthusiastic.

Fifth: I should mention that we've hit new highs for traffic on this end. Even with the news really hitting a high-point later in the day, we saw a 100% increase in traffic on May the 10th. I don't have numbers for yesterday, but we ought to see about the same boost. The forum, generally pretty low-rent is also seeing a lot of new faces.

More as it comes…

— May 12, 2004

This thing is really huge. It's all over the net. Thanks to Google's quick spidering, you can see about 2000 references to it already. I totally dig the fact that it got a reference on on Silicon Investor's Stock Talk forum. Also, someone named Kevin Rose who might be a famous television personality is supposed to have demoed the emulator on TechTV today. Of course, we don't get that channel in Canada.

Also, even though I've grown really attached to all of the traffic to the forum, you might want to check out the official PearPC support forum on Sourceforge. Of course I won't remove ours, but for obvious reasons that site might be more helpful.

Additionally, hBarcellos wants to create a PearPC support IRC channel. If anyone wants to create one, I'll be sure to pimp it right here. <p> <b>edited to add:</b> #pearpc on the Freenode IRC network is a sure bet.

Finally, despite all of the bonus traffic, not a SINGLE PERSON has voted for Liz Phair's “Exile in Guyville” as the best rock album of the 1990s. That makes me sad.

— May 12, 2004

Last news post for today, I swear to God. I'm going to try to condense these in the future.

Anyways, with my installation looking to take all day, I fed the directions to MeanE and his 3 ghz machine and now finally have a screenshot of my own to post. Click here for the beauty of Mac OS 10.2.

— May 12, 2004

Yesterday, forum reader Stilleto pointed out the existence of QEMU-PPC. He said:

“It's a PowerPC Reference Platform emulator. Currently booting the DebianPPC boot floppy on a PC, soon to support MandrakePPC - and possibly OS X. And QEMU for x86 has always been rather speedy (and speedily developed). Let the battle of the PPC emulators… begin!”

Its homepage is over here.

— May 13, 2004

A few more PearPC items for today:

First: The folks in the #pearpc channel have set up a couple of installation guides. There are a few FAQs and tips over here, and a short guide over here. Meanwhile, a few 10.2.4 screenshots are over here.

Second: when asked by Al Hartman in the Mac Emulation Forum if he might contribute to PearPC in the future, SheepShaver developer Gwenole Beauchesne replied, “[y]es, but I want to first finish SheepShaver changes I wanted. e.g. I have just committed a little improvement that brought nbench performance to around 1/7.3th of native speed.”

Third: If you want to contribute to the emulator, the official page now has a development section that will point you in the right direction. Also a lot of fun is the bug database on SourceForge.

— May 14, 2004

Things are starting to slow down a little now, it seems. The only cool thing for this evening is this configuration file generator made by a member of the forum. It looks cool, though I've heard some rumblings that Jim Watters might make up a real “Basilisk style” GUI for the emulator some time in the future.

Also, despite the “slowdown,” Google now records 11, 000 references to the emulator. Also, the #pearpc channel is quite busy (though a little techy) and both our forum and the official forum are buzzing along at a breakneck pace.

I think I've got the bandwidth problem under control. I think we will move to a new host in the next couple of days. You might see a “bandwidth exceeded” message between now and Monday, but if you do, please don't panic. The new host promises to be cheaper, faster and have better support. I know I said that about this host five months ago, but I am a moron.

— May 15, 2004

If you really like PearPC, stop by and visit the PearPC donation page, and offer what kind of financial support you can. Five percent of your donation goes to SourceForge itself, and the rest goes to the developer.

The developer, you should know, is a young student. He notes on that page that “Donations will speed up development since they will let us buy the needed hardware and software. Addtionally, users that have donated will get higher priority for support and feature requests.”

Additionally, if after you donate to the project, you'll get all sorts of kudos from this corner. If you want me to pimp a link, or whatever, just let me know.

— May 15, 2004

PearPC developer Sebastian Biallas visited the #pearpc channel last night to speak to some users. Here's some highlights from the log:

When asked what the greatest “real/emulated speed ratio” he hopes to achieve in the emulator, his reply was about 1/10, or that he wants to “execute one client instruction by the average of 10 host instructions.”

Biallas noted that he was not a user of Basilisk II, nor any of the commercial or open-source 68K Macintosh emulators.

Biallas is not a Macintosh owner, and he does his development on a 1ghz Athalon. In fact, he's never really spent a whole lot of time using a Macintosh.

Curiously, Billas did not start the project with PearPC, as we see it now, in mind. PowerPC emulation was the goal, but at a later point, it became feasible to boot MacOS X, etc. Channel member “Sho” offered this nice explantion:

“…keep in mind that it's we who focus on running OS X on it - for a computer sciences guy it would be interesting and challenging enough just to emulate an architecture, for academic reasons”

A bunch of technical questions were addressed, as well. If you need help with a particular question, be sure to stop by the channel and ask.

— May 15, 2004

How about some skinning news?

Mark “Deggy” Degg has created some really great looking Aqua skins for the Ericsson P900 and P800 cellular phones. Degg also tells me that they might work on “some symbian motorolas.”

Get the scoop, the downloads and some mocked-up “screenshots” over on Deggy's page.

— May 15, 2004

Few small items for this morning:

First, props to “johannesx75,” “nobody,” “rcwire,” and “ozterminal” for donating to PearPC.

Second: There is a small tutorial called “How to install 10.3 on PearPC without Darwin” over here. It is worth checking out.

Third: Toshimitsu Tanaka alerted me to the fact that his acknowledged the existence of PearPC on his site. Of course, since Darek has had access to a PPC emulator since early 2001, he probably isn't using PearPC much.

— May 16, 2004

And a few more items for this evening:

First: I found yet another installation guide for PearPC. This one was posted over on Neowin. I think we've got enough of these. Instead of linking them here, I'm going to put future reference guides in this forum thread.

Second: Richard Goodwin seems to be posting nightly win32 builds of the emulator from CVS on his site. Remember that you ought not report bugs found unless they are in an actual release.

Third: The #pearpc channel's guide has a link to an “experimental” build of PearPC for BeOS. Check it out.

Fourth: A fellow at the official support forum has posted a GUI based config file generator. It looks pretty cool.

Fifth: PearPC now ranks as the most active project on SourceForge. Google records 15, 500 references to the project. This site saw 3609 visitors on the 13th, and 3281 on the 14th.

— May 16, 2004

The folks at Wired are reporting on PearPC! The highlight of the article, for me, is Biallas's note that the emulator was in development for eighteen months before the public release was made. Also, he says that future versions will see “huge gains” in speed.

The article also notes that some users have been playing Quicktime movies in the emulator, which is news to me!

Get the scoop over here.

— May 17, 2004

If you are reading this, you are seeing E-Maculation from the servers ofA Small Orange. This host affords us a fair bit more bandwidth than our old digs.

Any forum posts made on the old server during the changeover (not too many, I hope) will have been lost.

Thanks to Mike “Jackalo” Kolassa for doing all of the changeover work.

More PearPC news to follow, no doubt.

— ClockWise, May 18 2004

Forum member “luckyy” has created a PearPC config file generator/program launcher and released it over in the forum. The coolest thing about the application is that it is modeled after the Basilisk II GUI!

— ClockWise, May 18 2004

Also, there is another PearPC story over on OSNews, and one on Slashdot. Of course, they are just reporting stuff that you probably read here sometime last week.

Meanwhile, over in the forum, MeanE (yay!) reported on another Configuration GUI for the emulator. This one looks pretty cool. Download it over here.

Meanwhile, in that Slashdot thread, one wag offered up this witicism from George Carlin:

“And now, a message from the National Apple Institute: FUCK PEARS!!”

Brilliant!

— ClockWise, May 19, 2004

PearPC 0.1.2 brings useable network support for Darwin PPC and MacOS X clients on Linux host computers (no Windows networking support yet!).

The changelog:

- PROM: fixed: “seek > 2^32 not impl”. - JITC: fixed mmio with overlapping pages (should fix “mac os crashes when idle”) - numpad keys mapped - (Win32) fixed: “'” key wasn't mapped - (Win32) fixed: F8 key wasn't mapped - (Win32) fixed: crash when unknown keys in F11 mode pressed - 3c90x: added MII support, some bugs fixed

You can download it here.

— Jackalo, May 20, 2004

Anxious for some PearPC news? You might want to swing by Richard Goodwin's site and download his UNSUPPORTED .2 pre-release build of the emulator. An enthusiastic thread about the build can be found right here in the forum.

The in-progress changelog reads like this:

- JITC: all crXX implemented
- JITC: tlbie only invalidate one entry
- JITC: optimize tlb_invalidate_all
- (POSIX) fixed: Alt and AltGr are swapped
- incorporated Roman Bogorodskiy's FreeBSD patch, many configure improvements
- tools/regex.h dos2unixed and then removed (in no particular order)
- configure support for mingw
- applied Francois Revol's BeOS patches (no.2+4).
- AMD64 portability fixes (mainly void* ↔ int conversions)
- HFS partition code fixes (untested!)
- removed tools/regex.c, tools/regex.h, io/prom/hfs/memcmp.c
- applied Anders F.Bjoerklund's patches (no.1+X11) to run PearPC on Mac OS X
- implemented conditional redraw code proposed by Jan von der Heydt

— ClockWise, May 23 2004

Richard Goodwin's site is hosting a full-screen patch for PearPC, written by a fellow called “Dalamax.” Remember to hit F10 F5 to make it work.

There is a forum thread about the topic over here.

— ClockWise, May 24 2004

The fellows from the #pearpc IRC channel have set up a keen website at PearPC.net. The site includes a number of the files and guides linked to on this site. It also has another forum you can use, you know, if this one doesn't do it for you.

— ClockWise, May 25 2004

Anonymous writes “Give it up for John_K one of the fine people on the #PearPC channel that was able to get Windows to Network with PearPC for successful Internet connection!

Check out http://www.kelley.ca/pearpc for more info and make sure to contribute to the post!

http://www.emaculation.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=1343.”

— ClockWise, May 26, 2004

Richard Goodwin has posted a special version of his nightly build featuring Dalamax's full screen patch and John_K's Windows Networking patch.

Visit his site at http://www.richardgoodwin.com/pearpc for the new builds.

You should always feel welcome to check up on the forum thread located here for help in configuring the TAP32 driver and OS X for Networking.

— Jackalo, May 26 2004

John_K has updated his Windows Networking patch to R2 just a few moments ago. The latest patch allows users of WindowsXP Service Pack 2 to use the new Networking patch as well.

You can snag the latest PearPC binary from his site at http://www.kelley.ca/pearpc, as well as the new instructions.

No word on a new build from Richard Goodwin, but seeing as how this update just happened minutes ago, I think we can forgive him.

Update: Apparently John_K has not uploaded the new version of PearPC to his website yet, or he put the wrong file in the download link. Only time will tell. We will keep you posted.

New Update: The download link on John_K's site for a build of PearPC sporting his new Windows Networking patch (R2) is now working. Make sure you use the TAP32 v2.0 driver, as reports say the old TAP32 v1.6 driver will not function (correctly?) with the latest build.

New Update 2: The version that John_K has posted on his site includes the fullscreen patch.

— Jackalo, May 26 2004

PearPC.net is reporting on a slightly faster version of the .2pre version of the emulator. Watch that site for a binary release in the not-too-distant future.

— ClockWise, May 30 2004

Because the PearPC section of the forum has been averaging a few hundred posts a day, I decided to organize it a little.

Now, instead of one folder labeled “PearPC,” you'll find in the forum five folders with specific purposes. Check 'em out.

I'm also looking for a couple of moderators to help me out with the day-to-day stuff. If you want to volunteer, check out this thread.

— ClockWise, May 31, 2004