For those wondering, I have a win32 build of 1.4.0 but it is on a hard disk that I can’t use now as I’m currently living on a boat.  Which has been fun, but the only catch is the cheap power supply is 220v and the boat is 110v.  Plus I don’t have a monitor.  I should be leaving for Japan in a few weeks, so I can get a new power supply and monitor there as I plan on spending two months.

I haven’t forgotten or moved on, I’m just still on my big vacation thing.

Hong Kong has really been great, I’ve met some fabulous people out here.  If I could get a job here I’d move here in 5 minutes (well I’d just find an apartment as I’m already here…) The place is awesome, I’d recommend anyone to check it out.  But I don’t speak Mandarin or Canto so that won’t be happening.  

I’ll try to do a small best of photos out here, but sadly the weather hasn’t been cooperating too well, and pollution has been off the chart… but really its a great place! .. !

In other news, I’m sure you’ve all read about the internet archive having a massive collection of software.?  Really good news as so much old stuff, besides the shovel ware gets disappeared.

So yes, I’m still alive, just .. been somewhat unavailable.

The blue one!

pop open the hatch so my AC can dehumidify..

pic of the middle of the boat

cruising on the sampan

another pic of the boat

Fish Heads!

So let’s start with a 3 way compile…

$ gcc -arch i386 -arch x86_64 -arch ppc7400 dhrystone.c -o dhrystone
$ file dhrystone
dhrystone: Mach-O universal binary with 3 architectures
dhrystone (for architecture i386): Mach-O executable i386
dhrystone (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
dhrystone (for architecture ppc7400): Mach-O executable ppc
$

This builds the single file for all 3 machine types of OS X..

For anyone that cares, this is my quad core box..

$ ./dhrystone
Dhrystone(1.1) time for 500000000 passes = 83
This machine benchmarks at 6024096 dhrystones/second

Ok, now let’s pull out the PowerPC executable, and run that….

$ lipo -extract ppc7400 dhrystone -output dpc
$ file dpc
dpc: Mach-O universal binary with 1 architecture
dpc (for architecture ppc7400): Mach-O executable ppc
$
$ ./dpc
Dhrystone(1.1) time for 500000000 passes = 214
This machine benchmarks at 2336448 dhrystones/second
$

Which isn’t too bad, seeing the emulator runs at 1/3rd speed of the native exe.. It’s no wonder that IBM bought transitive, and shut them down. This kind of technology would make it far too easy for everyone to move away from expensive CPUs…!

Now let’s extract the 32bit i386 exe.

$ lipo -extract i386 dhrystone -output di3

Nothing to really see here.

And for the final part, let’s combine the extracted PPC & i386 executables.

$ lipo di3 dpc -create -output dip
$ file dip
dip: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures
dip (for architecture i386): Mach-O executable i386
dip (for architecture ppc7400): Mach-O executable ppc

And there we have it.. Using this I guess I can try to find versions of Qemu that will hopefully cross build on my machine that I can stitch together so that some platforms (PPC) have *SOMETHING* to run at least…..

Or maybe it’ll help someone at least make a stub ‘we are sorry, nothing to see here’ vs an exe error.

Anyways, after googling around to see who linked my builds of Qemu, I found this site, by Takeda Toshiya that includes patches and binaries for PC-98 emulation via Qemu!

I understand the PC-98 had quite a following for all kinds of games as people shifted away from the Sharp X68000.. Who also announced last week that they would exit the PC market all together.