MACE: an New Classic Mac emulator project

[krum110487]

Love this project, I might bring 90% of your traffic, because I check the blog multiple times daily, I can't help it...)

Do you think this project would ever dip it's toe into the Mac Classic Power PC emulation? Not that I want to rush you or anything, I am just curious about how much effort do you think plugging that into your code would be. Obviously writing the emulation of the PowerPC processor is a ton of work... but I am not even aware if that is possible or if it is a complete re-write of the project, it would be great to eventually have something like this for PPC as well!

Thanks for the hard work!

[Pukka]

PowerPC support, yes it has been planned randomly and I guess I'll be looking at it more seriously after finishing the remaining 68k features (trace support and some trap instruction related details) and static disassembler.
Based on the performance results with directly interpreted 68k instructions, we probably would design the PowerPC emulation to support JIT already in the beginning.
The system emulation side should be quite directly compatible with PowerPC as is so wouldn't be rewrite but there are sure more software features to be supported by more advanced programs.

Sorry to not able to provide updates multiple times / day, but thanks for your input!

[gingerbeardman]

I don't know if you've solved it by now, but the solution to Universal builds on M1 is here: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/673323

Super interesting project! I need to catch up on the dev blog. Keep up the good work!

[adespoton]

I have to admit, my holy grail here is to eventually have a system where there's a file handler registered with macOS that 1: identifies the type of classic app (24-bit or 32-bit 68k, FAT, PPC), and then based on what it finds, instead of saying it can't run on this Mac, launches it inside a helper container, MACE style. It would probably also need a lookup table, to map all the known variations that require specific settings / MACE wrappers currently.

If this could be done in an "open spec" kind of way, people could write their own plug-ins for various hardware specs (eventually dropping in a handler for a PPC750 Mac with an ATi Rage GPU, for example, way down the road).

The end result would be something where anyone could add their own architecture, and macOS would then just be able to "run" most apps "seamlessly". If combined with containerization, you could even have the OS prompt for which existing configuration you want to run the application with on double-click.

Of course, one impediment to this is that MACE currently runs Apple Double files instead of named fork files, but that's a pretty small impediment, as you can easily present named forks as AD files with a bit of scripting.

Anyway, just one of my long-range dreams... using the macOS Frameworks system the way it was designed to be used, but rarely used outside of Apple.