4GB on a G4!

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darthnvader
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4GB on a G4!

Post by darthnvader »

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Cat_7
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Re: 4GB on a G4!

Post by Cat_7 »

Wow,

Who will ever need more? ;-)

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darthnvader
Mac Mechanic
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Re: 4GB on a G4!

Post by darthnvader »

I'd be interested to know how the Qemu team pulled it off, I remember reading years ago that the G4 should support 4Gb of ram, but some flaw limited it to 2Gb.

I suppose I could read Booke and see if that was addressed, tho it's just pretty cool what can be done when dealing with a virtual machine vs real hardware, we can see that we aren't limited to the original deign constraints of the real hw we are trying to emulated.

If only someone would put some time into the FPU and Altivec performance, we'd very soon have an emulator that was faster than any real G4 hw.

The integer performance on my Ryzen 7 1700 is already about the same speed as my 1.5Ghz 7447a.

Also, I was able to use PCI Passthrough of a PCI Firewire card, and it worked very well in both OS 9.2.2 and OS X Tiger. Work is ongoing on PCI Passthrough of a VGA card. Right now the limitation seems to be that Openbios lacks some of the Config- words needed by the Fcode ROM. Tho I was able to passthrough an OEM Apple GF6600 via card in qemu-system-ppc via the pseries machine via SLOF, and get video from it.
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adespoton
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Re: 4GB on a G4!

Post by adespoton »

It'd be nice to have a virtual passthrough as well, so that we could emulate various boards to patch through to real hardware. Is anyone still investigating those issues you found with OpenBIOS?
uyjulian
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Re: 4GB on a G4!

Post by uyjulian »

VirtGL support would be nice, so we can use the host's graphics driver.

I know that people have written framebuffer drivers with IOFramebuffer, but has anybody written any hardware-acceleration drivers? It doesn't look like Mesa isn't ported to macOS either.
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