PPCJITBETA02 (The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship)

We have just arrived to another exciting milestone on the long road: all the important instructions for the initial release are implemented under the JIT compiling.*

Lots of bugs were fixed, the emulator is much more stable now than the initial beta release.

Some new features are added too: I have merged the SAM440EP/Flex support (thanks to Soft3) and the CGX overlay for MorphOS (thanks to Thunder and Fab). See configuration documentation regarding how to set the overlay up.

As I already mentioned in the previous post: this beta release was delayed for a couple weeks due to a bug that slipped into the code base long time ago. It was discovered on Mac first, but I was able to reproduce it on MorphOS too. Took me a while to figure out what was going on, but it is fixed now.
This was a very tricky bug, it could be blamed for random crashes and endless loops also, not only on Mac, but on all supported platforms. It was triggered randomly based on the distance between the main application code and the code buffer in memory. (Thanks to Mike for discovering this right before I released the beta.)

I have spent a significant amount of time on figuring out how can I do the build for all supported platforms (AmigaOS4, MorphOS and MacOSX-PPC) using my environments. It wasn't easy, but finally I managed to do most of the release on my own.
As it seems MorphOS SDK does not support G5 yet, so I was not able to do the compiling by myself, but thanks to Fab the G5 executable is also available in the release package.
So, as of now users on all major supported platforms can grab the package and start using the right version.
(Sorry, Linux and BSD folks, you are still on your own.)

 

And the World trembled...

 ...or at least that tiny part which I am involved in when I am wearing my crazy latex suit with a huge letter "A" on my chest for my secret identity: the Amiga Software Developer.

After the first beta release forum posts, emails, news sites, blogs had risen in an enormous unmanageable thunderstorm, struck on me with insane amount of communication. (While the rest of the World barely noticed what have just happened.)
Finally I crawled through messages from every possible (and impossible) source and answered the questions to my best knowledge, accepted the good advices, kindly rejected some nonsense.

 

Aftermath

Since I received tons of feedback (good and bad), I inclined to draw some conclusions from the reaction to the very first beta release. Here is the summary for your benefit:

Some people don't understand how the JIT works and what is the exact purpose of it. All I can say is: please read the documentation... Some other (knowledgeable) folks stood up on the forums and educated the others, well done! I hope this helps, because I really don't have time to deal with it.

Many of the users have irrational expectations for how much the JIT compiling will speed up the emulator. (According to somebody: it supposed to be "ten times faster than the interpretive"... Err... Not likely. How did they come up with any number anyway?)

Well, the implementation is not finished yet, some of you guys don't really understand the concept of "beta release". Okay, I admit I was cheating a bit: technically the JIT compiler wasn't feature-complete when the first beta was done. Yet the remaining pieces were related to not too often used instructions anyway.
For the second beta the instructions are done*, yet there is clearly room for improvement regarding some bugs. Probably as soon as I will be able to fix up the optimization of the register- and flag-flow there will be a significant bump for the speed. (No, not "ten times" fold.)

It is hard to measure how much faster the programs are running and some lovely people baffled on this too. Since there is usually no obvious visual clue for the speedup and a 30%-50% increase in the processor speed is probably hard to notice while your favorite jump-and-run game is jumping and running.
Yet, you can feel that the whole emulation is more snappy than before probably even when you simply run Workbench. Except when it crashes. But even then: it crashes 30%-50% faster! :)

Too bad that some good souls are obsessed with their favourite game/program and keep saying that the JIT is worthless because it doesn't make any difference for that particular piece of software. As it seems this JIT compiling is not for you then.

There was one more interesting thing what I have noticed too late unfortunately: G5 support for MorphOS. Since I don't have a G5 machine I never considered that there is a need for that. But there were some murmur about the speed of the MorphOS version on G5 on some forums. No wonder: it needs a special version, which can be compiled from the sources for some time now. (Thanks to Tobias Netzel and to Fab for the special build.)
Probably the same applies to the PA Semi processor and the Amiga X1000, but I don't have that one either. (Donations? :)
Also the mysterious support for SAM440EP/Flex, what I have never heard of before. No wonder it was missed.

Fun fact from the Outer World: I tried to explain to my colleagues how I spent my Summer vacation. However, I am significantly older than almost any of them, so they were looking at me with confusion in their eyes mixed with a little pity. "Yea, my father loves fooling around with those old machines too!" - was one of the comments. Well put, Sir, well put.

 

Anyway...

To make you (some other geeks around the World) happy: here is the new beta...

https://sourceforge.net/projects/euaeppcjit/files/0.8.29-PPCJITBETA02

In case you stop reading here (or you already skipped the first cheesy part):
as always, please read the README for your comfort and safety. Thanks.

Since I bought an iBook for 50 NZD, now I can produce the MorphOS and the MacOSX versions too which were also included in this release together with the AmigaOS4 version. (And by buying a Mac I broke one of my principles: no Apple product crosses the door of my house. I hope you guys are content what you were doing...)

You can find the changes since the last beta in the README file, or in the changesets at the SourceForge repository from R67 down to R53.

 

Fragmentation

I must admit I have learned a lot in the past month about the sorry state of the E-UAE project. I didn't know what is the current situation of the various binary releases until I received some references to modified AmigaOS4 and MorphOS binary versions.
I guess this is the destiny of any abandoned open source project: lots of good people is trying to improve it, but nobody is standing up and takes over the maintenance of the project.

Well, I am of the same kind, as it seems. It was never my goal to take the ownership of the E-UAE project or fork it into a new iteration.
However, as soon as I released the first beta of the JIT compiled version the watching eye of the public turned to my little scared pet project and I received lot of questions about whether this-or-that particular fix from various developers were included or not. (Mostly not.)

To satisfy at least some part of the user base I tried to gather the various fixes from every corner of the Internet and applied them on the source code. This means no way new base source repository for the E-UAE project, but at least it will help whoever wants to grab the torch and probably it will be useful for you, dear user in the meanwhile in the form of the beta releases.

 

Progress indicator

As of now I switch from batch release strategy to immediate update. This means: I will commit each change one by one to the SourceForge repository as soon as the change is ready instead of buffering up lots of changes locally and commit them in a big changeset.
So, if you look for the repository changesets and the tickets then you can watch the progress of the project closely.

I also make use of the tickets in the completion of the various fixes and tasks:

https://sourceforge.net/p/euaeppcjit/tickets

I added milestones to the tickets, so you can get a feeling of the upcoming beta and the included changes, fixes.
Open tickets are defining the majority of the outstanding work. I am currently working on the accepted ticket, while pending tickets are already committed to the repository, but not released in binary form yet. Released tickets are the closed ones.

For PPCJITBET03 you can find the planned changes here:

https://sourceforge.net/p/euaeppcjit/tickets/milestone/PPCJITBETA03

There is also a milestone named "PARKED" which is a holding box for the various bugs and problems that are not considered for this project (yet).

 

Thanks

Finally, big thanks goes to: Thunder, kas1e, MickJT, Fab, Tobias Netzel and Mike Blackburn for helping me with lots of things regarding bug finding, fixing, platform support and constantly watching out for the updates on the repository.

I am still waiting for any (detailed) bug reports, just have a good read of the README file before you jump to your email client.

Footnote
*There is a fine print here: I was struggling with CMP2 instruction and finally I gave up after a couple days. The binary code for the instruction is bundled with CHK2 and I couldn't figure out how solve the exception handling for that. So, this instruction remains unimplemented for now, not a big deal luckily.