Thursday, June 24, 2004

A very fast emulator

I stumbled upon a very exciting project: a multi-platform emulator. Well, of course ther was Bochs, but it runs too slow on a "normal" computer to be useful. Well, now there is QEMU. It can emulate an x86 type processor, and PowerPC is under way (well you could also use for this PearPC).
The good thing is that it runs under Windows and Linux (x86 and PowerPC). Network is available in the last version (0.5.5) and many things seem to happen on the CVS version (but I haven't tried compiling it myself). And the most important thing: it's fast. Only 4 times slower on integer operations than the host CPU, and 10 times on floating point operations, but still it's 65 times faster than Bochs, and 1.2 times faster than Valgrind (which is not really an emulator as far as I could see).






Target CPUUser emulationSystem emulation
x86OKOK
ARMOKNot supported
SPARCTestingNot supported
PowerPCOKTesting


This is running Morphix (which seems a nice project also by the way, the desktop looks very nice. Maybe I'll talk about it later):
[the screenshot got hosed by the hosting company]
It's still a hog on the processor by the way, so you'd better use a double-CPU computer (I wish I had one of those).

This is KDE starting in MandrakeMove:
[the screenshot got hosed by the hosting company]

And this is MandrakeMove once it's running:
[the screenshot got hosed by the hosting company]

TuxRacer starts, but it's still painfully slow (and hence unplayable).
[the screenshot got hosed by the hosting company]

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous11:34 AM

    wow, this is cool... I've been looking for an emulator, but the best I could come up with (free) was Bochs.

    btw, no need for gmail account for, was able to get one elsewhere. Thanks!

    Lloyd

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