The funny part was: the developer pre-release was all hunky dory with our app, but then came the final release and things have changed dramatically overnight. Since I am working as a mobile app developer recently, I had to spend lot of time on it, even some weekend day(s).Okay, I stop grumbling, we are finally managed to take everything under control. It was stressful and annoying.
So, I guess you might guess why the recent update is so thin: when I finally managed to get home I was fully drained, I had no strength to look at one more line of code.
I have implemented three missing addressing mode which are included in this update. I also started to work on the complex addressing modes (also called 68020 addressing modes), which are... well... really complex. I am less than half way thru with them, but in the meanwhile I didn't want to hold back this:
G5 support
While I suffered in deep agony, luckily Tobias Netzel was busy again and managed to fix up E-UAE for the G5 (PowerPC 970) processors. He got rid of the mcrxr emulated unsupported instruction (see the chapter about mcrxr) for this processor type. He also done some optimizations regarding the microcoded instruction usage, but probably we need to do more about it once.
The situation was very much similar to the 68060 and some unsupported FPU instructions which were emulated by the OS. If you remember that time how much Oxypatcher increased the speed of some floating point calculation intensive apps you can understand why E-UAE was soo sluggishly slow on G5 before: almost half of the emulated instructions make use of the mcrxr instruction for emulating some arithmetic flags.
With the recent changes this PPC instruction is not used for anything if the emulator was compiled for G5 and the fix helps a lot on the interpretive emulation too.
Some benchmarks from Tobias using the Mandelbrot test (G5 - 2.1 GHz):
Interpretive emulation:
- using mcrxr: 5:02 secs
- without mcrxr: 59 secs
- using mcrxr: 7:46 secs (yes, even slower than the interpretive...)
- without mcrxr: 27.5 secs
- using mcrxr: 1:47 sec
- without mcrxr: 18 sec
By the way, these changes might have affect on the Cell PPE and Xenon processors too. Any volunteering developers?
Bounty
Recently, I had a cautious look on the bounty page for the project and I was a bit shocked by the fact that Mr. William Morris donated 1000 EUR. That was half of the previously collected bounty. Very generous of you.
Maybe this post is not the best opportunity to thank you all for your support. I hope I fulfill the expectations rather sooner than later.
Give some love to it so we can start to use it.
ReplyDeleteBecause even the emulators need some love. :)
DeleteDo you think you will have it ready before the end of this year?
ReplyDeleteIt depends on what you would expect as "ready", as soon as the operating system starts up it is usable. Although, lots of instructions are not done yet, but most of these are either simple to implement or just not that important.
DeleteBut I guess the answer would be: no, I doubt it will be fully done by the end of the year. I am pretty sure that even if most of the stuff would finished there will be plenty of bugs and it takes lot of time to ironing those out.