Any change for Sheppshaver+Basilisk II development progress?

Anything about Mac emulation that does not belong in the above categories.

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ruthan
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Any change for Sheppshaver+Basilisk II development progress?

Post by ruthan »

Hello,
i know that these project are on paper dead and i ideal world would be better just to have have instructions and whole machine emulator for PPC and 68k like QEMU, but QEMU development is very slow, their documentation is crazy and is not user friedly - GUI for Windows is maybe 8 years dead.

So i think that here is still need for classic emulators. I dont understand why there are not big community push for Shapeshifter improvements, there is lots of bugs and unimplemented things, some things are very unstable.. so there is huge room for improvements and this emulators are useful. I want to say there are lots of meaningfulness emulators which much bigger developers activity, what is wrong with these project, source code, community? Or its only about that these project are not known and we need to spread for knowledge and do some promo - as articles, youtube videos etc?
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adespoton
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Re: Any change for Sheppshaver+Basilisk II development progr

Post by adespoton »

If you think qemu is slow and confusing, it's nothing compared to Basilisk II and SheepShaver. People are working on qemu because it is a well designed codebase that makes sense and can be improved incrementally -- plus, it has corporate support; there are people employed by the likes of IBM who work full-time on qemu.

BII/SS by comparison are the brainchild of a few limited people who designed them with a number of shortcuts and tricks that aren't pure emulation. They developed it from the ground up, so they understood exactly how it all worked. Unfortunately, many of the shortcuts they took depended on architectural assumptions that are not true with today's hardware and operating systems.

So, for example, I was able to dive into qemu and figure out in a matter of less than an hour how to add and implement new screen resolutions. To do that in BII would have been quite a headache. Plus, a bunch of underlying code really needs to be totally rewritten to make it future-proof, and that's the really difficult bits of the emulator.

If you want a qemu GUI, there's java-qemu, AQemu, and QtEmu, all of which are cross-platform, and the first of which can be deployed without any development environment needed to compile it. A lot of current qemu development has gone into its integration into KVM, which is tied to the Linux kernel, but other interfaces are definitely available. UIs haven't been worked on too much recently just due to the speed of actual emulation development; by the time the UI is updated, it is out of date, and potentially non-functional. But the emulator itself has a built-in monitor that controls most aspects of the emulator, no external UI needed.

There have been a few attempts at UIs for BII and SS, but due to such a small userbase in comparison, they tend to languish after the original developer moves on to other things.

That said: there are a few people who have started documenting SS and BII recently, with a view to making development updates easier. If you have anything you can add to these efforts, please do! Any work you can do toward this effort will add to the possibility of future development moving at a faster pace with more people involved.
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Ronald P. Regensburg
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Re: Any change for Sheppshaver+Basilisk II development progr

Post by Ronald P. Regensburg »

adespoton wrote:BII/SS by comparison are the brainchild of a few limited people who designed them with a number of shortcuts and tricks that aren't pure emulation. They developed it from the ground up, so they understood exactly how it all worked. Unfortunately, many of the shortcuts they took depended on architectural assumptions that are not true with today's hardware and operating systems.
It is also good to realize that regular development of BasiliskII and SheepShaver stopped 10 years ago when Gwenole Beauchesne "suspended" work on BasiliskII and SheepShaver. Several users with developer skills have since contributed with improvements and fixes. But people with the needed skills usually have little spare time and energy to invest in these emulators next to their regular work.

Most users can probably still be found among Mac users who where confronted with the loss of the "Classic Environment" when MacOSX went from PPC to Intel. Especially SheepShaver was a way to continue using old software and still is sometimes the only way to open existing documents that were created in specific, or even proprietary, formats by abandoned PPC applications. The majority of improvements in the past years were for the OSX version of SheepShaver.
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ruthan
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Re: Any change for Sheppshaver+Basilisk II development progr

Post by ruthan »

adespoton wrote:If you think qemu is slow and confusing, it's nothing compared to Basilisk II and SheepShaver.
I meant user experience, you are talking about code, two different things.
adespoton wrote: If you want a qemu GUI, there's java-qemu, AQemu, and QtEmu, all of which are cross-platform..
Ok, so were i can download complete- actual QEMU with GUI package for Windows?
But people with the needed skills usually have little spare time and energy to invest in these emulators next to their regular work.
Its management problem, i dont know how big is userbase, but people as i are willing to pay for quaility. So we could start some to create some fund
and make payed goals for developers.. Feature for Money model. I think it doesnt need to be charity thing.
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