Transplanting the Mac’s Central Processor: Gary Davidian’s 68000 Emulator (2020)

computerhistory.org

44 points·tambourine_man··8 comments

Apple has done a remarkable job moving the Mac from 68K to PowerPC to x86 to ARM over the course of three decades.

Their latest static-translation based emulator (Rosetta2) is pretty cool as well.

The CPU world seems like it was a lot more interesting in the early 1990s, with Apple creating native versions of Mac OS for 68K, x86, and PowerPC – and running Mac OS in emulation on 29K and 88K (on Apple hardware prototypes) as well as on SPARC, POWER, and PA-RISC (on Sun/IBM/HP workstations.)

Shame that Apple didn't try making an ARM-based Mac back then as well - though they did use ARM chips in the Newton.

They are helped by non-standard extensions to the basic ARM architecture of their CPUs (i.e., Apple proprietary extensions), such as harmonizing the memory models of x64 and ARM.

Having ported a 6502 emulator to MacOS 8 (to play C64 SID music), I found this rather interesting.

Thanks for posting this.

Transplanting the Mac’s Central Processor: Gary Davidian’s 68000 Emulator (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28914208 - Oct 2021 (21 comments)

As soon as I submitted this link I thought I remember doing it before. Thanks

Just to be clear, the repost was quite ok because the previous thread was over a year ago. (This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.) I just link to previous threads because curious readers sometimes like to look at the old comments—that's all!

Wow! What an amazing story!

I never imagined MacOS ran on AMD29K and 88000’s.

IIRC PowerPC was the merger of the Power architecture with something close to the 88k's signaling at Apple's behest.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com