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One more solution left that I haven’t mentioned: a MorphOS emulator.

> a MorphOS emulator. :-)

What do you mean? A software that acts like MorphOS but isn't? Or a software that acts like MorphOS-compatible hardware? If the latter: QEMU.

I mean software that allows you to install MorphOS on a standard PC machine. Just like WinUAE does for AmigaOS.

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You mean, really unusably slowly?

PPC is the worst case scenario to emulate: multiple instruction sets, FPU and Altivec, MMU, special purpose registers, condition registers, more than one instruction set, decrementer, etc etc.

And x64 is the worst case scenario to emulate it: all that would need to be done on software, with no hardware acceleration on a single thread on a CPU family that now routinely requires 16 or more cores to meet its true speed, and which is architecturally and logically very different.

I'd say it might be decades before something like QEMU was fast enough, but it's already been decades, and the core increase seems to be pushing us further rather than closer, so I'd actually be quite comfortable predicting it never could.

@KennyR

While all that may be true, it is also true that the OG Rosetta managed o.k. speed running PPC code even on something as weak as a CoreDuo.

PPC Emu on ARM64 hardware is around the corner ;)

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Using half the CPU's actual computing power, not one sixteenth...

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Not sure what tree you're trying to bark at here....

We already use only a part of the computing power since many supported PPC are dual or even quad core.
The initial CoreDuo/CoreSolo were not that far off from G4/G5 clock by clock and core by core.
Current x86 cores are several times faster than those from 2006.

So if we could somehow get Rosetta's performance running MorphOS on a current Intel or AMD CPU we would have created the fastest MorphOS computer by quite a margin.

Not that thats gonna happen.

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/me looks over at my dual EPYC 7502 ... 1/128th >.<

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It's an arithmetic growth while overall CPU speed is growing geometrically.

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QEMU is a full emulator, it emulates the whole CPU warts and all. Rosetta was not some magic hyper-efficient form of it. It only translated user-mode instructions. Where it could, it pulled x64 code from the OS to replace PowerPC code rather than translate it. MacOS talked to Rosetta for all the necessary address mapping, and was an abstracted layer that never had to deal with the MMU, I/O, timers, and so on like MorphOS does.

And before anyone says it could be added, I'm not sure MorphOS is capable of doing that by dint of its inherent design of being a shared address OS. Like multi-core, it's not even clear where to begin, never mind how it might work.

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Btw, there's also qemu usermode emulation which only does cpu emulation plus syscall translation.

Allows for example to run 32 bit big endian PowerPC Linux programs on 64 bit little endian x64 Linux.

Like for example AROS PPC Hosted/Linux (older version, because unmaintained, so tried old build from 2013) which "boots" into AROS desktop in 2 seconds on AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D. With maybe 10 year old PC (i5 4590) it was 4 seconds.





[ Edited by Georg 26.01.2026 - 12:42 ]

Sure, that is kinda what Amithlon did 25 years ago.

Wich would either need support from the OS or the ability to patch it.