Yearly update

Time for the yearly update of the blog. It seems like I’m not the blogging type of person.

But here is an update.

I  just came home from a vacation in California. 3 weeks visiting San Francisco and Los Angeles. It was really nice.

The emulation project is still active but has undergone some changes. I started to build an adapter for AROS as a side project. This adapter will keep track of system data structures and convert system calls in the emulation to direct AROS system calls. So far I can get a small “Hello World” program running. If all goes well I will consider merging it with the older simulation code to one code base.

A similar project is in development right now by o1i. It is based on the UAE emulation core and is modified to interact with AROS. More about this in o1i’s blog. The main drawback with this emulation is that it is still UAE and will need a real proprietary Amiga ROM image. At least until M68k native AROS can replace the original ROMs, but that seems far away. The best thing about this integration with UAE is that old hardware-banging demos and games will continue to work. That will never work in my adapter.

Amiga emulation

I’m working on a project with a friend of mine. We are building an emulator of an Amiga system.

You might wonder why, there exists very good emulators already out there like UAE. The thing with UAE and similar emulators is that it emulates the complete hardware as an enclosed virtual machine running totally separated from the host machine. Our idea is to be able to just run Amiga applications directly not requiring the whole emulated machine.

The AROS AmigaOS replacement does not emulate the hardware and is compiled directly to native code on the host computer. AROS emulates the whole operating system, and it requires that all applications is compiled for the native CPU.

We want to be able to run the old MC68000 Amiga binaries, as many of the old applications are closed source. We want to be able to run the binaries on an Intel CPU too, and we don’t want to start a complete operating system virtual machine every time we run an application.

To accomplish this we need a CPU emulation combined with an AmigaOS simulator. We only want to simulate the parts of AmigaOS that is needed for a specific application and that is the challenge. The first goal is to be able to run simple console applications.

We are working on a first release and I will post here when it is time for that. We have chosen not to base our project on other open source code but to create everything from scratch, but the plan is still to release under the GPL license.

Happy new year 2008

New year, new ideas, new code

On-line with my smartphone

Today I set up a new wireless router at home and managed to get my Qtek S200 connected. I had an old D-link 614 before but it had some serious issues making DHCP incompatible with some versions of Windows Mobile Edition. I chose the cheapest Netgear router at the local computer store and it worked perfectly. I’m writing this post with my phone.

One other thing I learnt today is that Windows Vista has some special security requirements regarding wireless connections. It won’t for example accept wireless nets with an SSID that contains spaces. I’ve searched through the settings in Windows a couple of times, but have not been able to find where these security settings can be changed. It seems to have been hidden good by Microsoft. I guess it is not something they like you to change easily.

First post

So.. its about time I set up a blog of my own. I’ve come to realize that much information can be found in people’s blogs and that a blog can be used as a place to store ideas and thoughts. Not neccessary for other people’s delight, but maybe just like a personal scrapbook, for non-sensitive information of course. It is the Internet after all..