Homebrew Dolphin on iMac or related

[Lanlan]

So I was thinking, the Wii (as well as the Gamecube and Wii U) have processors based on the PowerPC 750 line, much like the iMac (those ugly colorful monitor computer combos from ten years ago). So, would a Wii emulator such as Dolphin work on a system like this, after some tweaking?
I don't have an iMac or other PPC-based computer, i'm just wondering if it would be possible

 

[Maxternal]

I've thought the same thing for a long time.
Instead of an emulator it would probably be more like a Wii/GameCube virtual machine for Mac. They would probably have to borrow some code from Dolphin to virtualize the GPU and the Starlet processor ... controls, etc. but at least in MY not too expert point of view it's always sounded doable. I think just no developer's taken the time to sit down and do it.

(Of course, I've also used to think the same Wii emulator could be made for the PS3 and 360 since they both also have Power based processors ... but I'm told that it's not QUITE similar enough.)

 

[Rydian]

No. You're thinking about virtualization, while Dolphin is an emulator.

An entirely new piece of software would need to be written for what you want, and it wouldn't be any faster/better since it's not just the CPU that's the concern.

 

[McHaggis]

No. You're thinking about virtualization, while Dolphin is an emulator.

An entirely new piece of software would need to be written for what you want, and it wouldn't be any faster/better since it's not just the CPU that's the concern.

Also, as I just posted in another thread, Dolphin is heavily optimised for x86 processors and would require huge amounts of time to port to a different architecture.

 

[Lanlan]

Would virtualization work efficiently then?

 

[Rydian]

Virtualization is much faster than hardware emulation in many instances... but I don't think you realize just how much weaker the old PPC Macs are than modern machines.
http://www.primatelabs.com/blog/2008/06/mac-performance-june-2008/
The best-specced PPC processor tested there is the PowerPC G5 2.5 GHz (and that's overclocked, 2.1 is the highest the G5 came stock from Apple).
That's still slightly below the Core 2 of the time, the T9500, which has half the cores, so per-core it's half the power.
The T9500 scores 1758 on passmark, but the i5-2500K (a recommended CPU for Dolphin) scores 6501, ~3.5 times as powerful.

 

[Lanlan]

Virtualization is much faster than hardware emulation in many instances... but I don't think you realize just how much weaker the old PPC Macs are than modern machines.
http://www.primatelabs.com/blog/2008/06/mac-performance-june-2008/
The best-specced PPC processor tested there is the PowerPC G5 2.5 GHz (and that's overclocked, 2.1 is the highest the G5 came stock from Apple).
That's still slightly below the Core 2 of the time, the T9500, which has half the cores, so per-core it's half the power.
The T9500 scores 1758 on passmark, but the i5-2500K (a recommended CPU for Dolphin) scores 6501, ~3.5 times as powerful.

I know they're much weaker, but since the processor is fairly similar would that matter? Basically I'm wondering if it's possible to "make a wii", or something close, with a PPC.

 

[finkmac]

As I posted elsewhere on this forum, there was an emulator (well, virtualizer) for PPC Macs that virtualized the GameCube... I think it was called gCube or something like that...

 

[Arm73]

Interesting topic.
It would be awesome to rebuild a Wii based on a PPC Mac that outputs up to 1080p natively ( like Dolphin, but not just upscaling it like the Wii U ) and loads games images straight from the HDD.
That would be a dream console, worth keeping for years to come and enjoy all Wii, Wiiware and VC titles on it ( and GC of course )!

 

[Lanlan]

So i'm not an idiot for thinking of this, then?

 

[Maxternal]

From what little I've seen on gCube,
http://www.emulator-zone.com/doc.php/gamecube/gcube.html
http://www.zophar.net/gc/gcube.html
it's an emulator originally for PC but it's open sourced so someone tried to port it to Mac so it was still emulating rather than virtualizing even though it was using the same processor family.

The virtualization/virtual machine idea I still think to be a great idea ... you'd just have to find someone with the knowledge and interest to get it working.

 

[Lanlan]

So anyone in the know think this is legitimately possible?