Tim Powys-Lybbe wrote: > In message of 23 Jan, Timothy Coltman <timothy.coltman at gmail.com> wrote: > > <snip of an fascinating struggle> > >> Anyway, after getting rid of !CDFix, I got the desktop to run properly. > > Congratulations! I had tried to compile something on my Mac a couple of > weeks back and completely gave up. > >> Would the developers be interested in patches so others can get Spoon >> compiling on a Mac without hacking source code? > >I am not a developer, just a user and would be very interested in a >version that ran directly on Mac-OS X. It might get away from the one >or two very real problems with VARPC on Mac.
I have refined my original fixes a bit so that you don't have to hack so much of the source code (the changes to "ide.c"). If someone can tell me how to submit patches, presumably in "diff" form, I'll do so. There are changes to "romload.c", "configure.ac" and "rpcemu.h", and you need to make a copy of "rpc-linux.c" and rename it to "rpc-macosx.c". You also need to download and install the Allegro thing that RPCEmu uses. I could stick some information on the riscos.info wiki if no-one minds so you could get it running yourself, following a set of instructions. > >So I would like to think that RPCemu will continue to move in the >direction of becoming a real production machine. Same here, though I would mainly use it for nostalgic reasons and not for any serious use. > To me the current >difficulties with RPCemu centre around these: > > Can you get networking going? (This is possible on the LInux version > but not, it seems, on the Windows version.) There isn't a source file for Windows networking - just Linux. I changed the Makefile so it would compile this for Macs as well as Linux and ran into some troubles with something called "tun" which seems to be used by the emulator to communicate between the host and the RPC via tunnels. Leopard lacks this, so I ended up (to cut a long story short) downloading an implementation from SourceForge and installing that. Several hours experimenting later (I really don't know what I'm doing - I'm a Windows developer by trade) has resulted in a little progress but not much: I can get an Ethernet tunnel as suggested in the Linux install guide on the Spoon web site by typing "ipconfig -a", but for some reason the IP address doesn't match what RPCEmu is requesting, so it doesn't work. I'm not that au fait with networking under RISC OS either. Worse still: I've had a large number of kernel panics, all caused by the networking code or the tunnel thing I've been using. If I start the emulator once, it'll appear to get an IP address but if I run it again, it causes a kernel panic. Never had a kernel panic on this Mac Pro before - it's all rather novel (but not fun). I have wiped the tunnel thing and I'll see if I can find another one. > > Any view of speed? I reckon, under Linux, RPCemu is quite a bit > slower than VARPC on the Mac, and VARPC on the Mac itself is rather > slow on the disc access front. Dynamic recompiling doesn't work at all - just gives me a blank screen (using RISC OS 3.7). If I turn dynamic recompiling off, the MIPS display that pops up in the terminal every second averages out at around 30 MIPS. I have no idea whether that's good or bad, but it does seem a bit slow when scrolling Zap windows and the like. The host has plenty of oomph: dual, dual-core Xeons (3.0GHz) and 4GB of RAM. It's such a long time since I last used RISC OS in any form (1999) and my memory is hazy. cI haven't tried Virtual RPC: £120 plus P&P being the main reason. I did think about trying RISC OS 4.02 - the £5 version - but for some reason RISC OS Ltd's entire website is inaccessible to me. -- [email protected]
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