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BasiliskII Macintosh 68k Emulator Ported to ESP32-P4 / M5Stack Tab5

90 points27 daysgithub.com
bArray27 days ago

Looking at the M5Stack Tab5 IoT Development Kit [1] based on the ESP32-P4 - it's a really nice piece of kit.

[1] https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5stack-tab5-iot-developme...

nottorp27 days ago

Yeah, the first thing I thought of when seeing this was "how long till this tablet thingy will be out of stock everywhere?".

stonogo27 days ago

I note that the vide coding tools managed to keep the license headers in individual files, but the COPYING file containing the GPL2 has not made the transition.

jhbadger27 days ago

Pity that this isn't for the Cardputer (a M5Stack device that includes a built in (tiny) screen and keyboard), although it might be impractical on it.

swiftcoder27 days ago

How performant is this - are we able to achieve similar speeds as an actual 68k Mac on embedded hardware?

vardump27 days ago

At 8 MHz, a 68k can execute at most 2M instructions per second. So the answer is going to be yes, if this manages to execute one 68k instruction per ~200 cycles.

I think executing an instruction is going to be closer to 20-50 cycles than 200, so it should be much faster than a real 68k CPU.

I think performance is likely to be in the ballpark of a 68040 @20 MHz, but that's just a guess. This would leave 20 cycles for each emulated instruction. With JIT you could reach 200 MHz+ comparable speeds.

rasz27 days ago

Everything is coming from PSRAM including frame buffer (at 15 fps) so performance is going to be abysmal.

vardump27 days ago

You should be able to cache hot code and data in the SRAM. Although it'd significantly increase complexity.

iamflimflam127 days ago

The P4 is pretty high spec with a 400MHz dual-core RISC-V

cardanome27 days ago

Especially as there is a decent working BasiliskII port for the PlayStation Portable with its 333MHz single-core MIPS CPU.

So this should be much easier.

zeckalpha27 days ago

Hoping rePalm ends up there, too! https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=27.%20rePalm

dmitrygr27 days ago

i am doing MIPS first (for V-tech Helio), but i will eventually

zeckalpha26 days ago

Awesome. I was looking at SASD for my Palm VII just yesterday. :)

anthk27 days ago

VMac would be lighter.