From mint-bounce@lists.fishpool.fi Thu Feb 14 07:07:14 2008 Message-ID: <47B42340.6030106@highlandsun.com> Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2008 03:17:20 -0800 From: Howard Chu User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; rv:1.9b3pre) Gecko/2008013117 SeaMonkey/2.0a1pre MIME-Version: 1.0 To: p.slegg@scubadivers.co.uk CC: mint@lists.fishpool.fi Subject: Re: [MiNT] 68k binary emulator References: <20080214110752.2v20vh8rb4woowgs@pop.freeola.net> In-Reply-To: <20080214110752.2v20vh8rb4woowgs@pop.freeola.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: mint-bounce@lists.fishpool.fi Errors-to: mint-bounce@lists.fishpool.fi X-original-sender: hyc@highlandsun.com Precedence: bulk List-help: List-unsubscribe: List-Id: X-List-ID: List-subscribe: List-owner: List-post: p.slegg@scubadivers.co.uk wrote: > Quoting Peter Persson: > >> Hi, >> >> Lately I've been working on a rather silly project which I thought >> I'd share with you. Basically it's a 68000 binary emulator, which >> launches an application in an emulated environment, but tunnels OS >> calls etc. to the host OS. >> >> Why on earth would anyone want to do this? Well, today it's fairly >> pointless, but let's say someone ports the kernel to PPC, Arm or >> whatever. An emulator of this kind could then be used to provide some >> basic degree of compatibility with 68k applications. > > About 8-9 years ago when people were discussing porting to cf or PPC > I was thinking about the various approaches to porting applications > although my C skills weren't/aren't up to it. > > When an M68k GEM app is run, the calls to the GEM/OS features would be > passed directly on. The remaining parts of code would have to be > converted to the appropriate assembler. This might be like the method > you have used. > > Then I thought that rather than emulating everytime an old app is run, > why not, convert it once and save the new version of the application > in it's cf or PPC version ? Exactly. You would have an object-code recompiler. Just like the one I wrote back in 1986 to run PC-DOS apps on the ST. -- -- Howard Chu Chief Architect, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc/ Chief Architect, OpenLDAP http://www.openldap.org/project/