X86 Virtualization on other architectures

Since 486/Pentium is free game to emulate and powerful enough to run doom, why hasn't anyone ever tried to port an emulator to hobbyist architectures like PIC32, RISC-V, or ARM, or at least take advantage of x86 emulation?

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Are you talking about qemu?

nobody wants to spend a year porting an emulator to run doom at 3fps.

x86 emulation on ARM is already painfully slow. Why the fuck would you want to emulate on micro-controllers?

It's ass. This is why CISC will always be superior in this case. Emulating RISC on CISC is a lot easier than vice-versa

I would much rather have IPC approach as close to 1 as possible.

With emulation it really depends on the instructions themselves as opposed to bare metal. CISC, do to its very nature, can never be emulated 1:1 on a RISC machine

qemu, Bochs, DOSbox, PCem
Not sure about the last one, but the others run on whatever architecture you want them to run. There are plenty of people playing DOS games on their phones right now.

Why not just stick some x86 hardware on a board/card attached to the main RISC computer that's used exclusively to run an x86 guest? I'm pretty sure I've seen this in Sun SPARC workstations that can run Windows XP on real x86 hardware using a special card that gives you an Intel processor. You're still using the host PC's graphics, memory, storage, etc but you aren't left with a slow as shit emulated CPU.

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Hack this, spread the word
eltechs.com/product/exagear-desktop/

they already have that, it's called Intel ME and AMD PSP.

Let's go a step further and just get an FPGA card, which we will reprogram on the go with whatever hardware we need at the moment, from x86 processor to additional GPU to hardware sound synthesizer.

See

you mean a co-processor?

Modern x86 processors are already essentially a CISC ISA emulated on RISC.

DSx86 runs a lot older DOS titles fine on the early NDS handhelds (ARM-based). Problem here is the screen resolution is 256x192, so a typical DOS screen gets scrunched.
In theory, 8086tiny can be ported to many little-endian systems, so give it a shot. I think it only goes up to CGA though, but that still accounts for a lot of stuff.

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It's been done in the 80's, but nowadays it's better to avoid x86 hardware unless you enjoy botnet and bugs gallore. I guess it would be okay if you stuck with 80386 chips.

Amiga sidecar. Later they made better ones (including 80486) that fitted on a Zorro card to plug into your A2000, A3000, or A4000 case.
amiga.resource.cx/exp/a1060

If you enjoy spending $300 on ancient hardware, I have seen Pentium 2 class boards for old PowerMacs with PCI. Probably no 3D acceleration unless you get a really late model however. If I had the Power Mac G3/G4 and the money to spare, I'd probably try it out. It's just a bit too expensive for my taste though.

Not worth it for me. An old 386DX/33 is enough to run every DOS game I care about. But that chip can be easily emulated on any current hardware, except maybe the smallest microcontrollers.

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Thanks for making me cry, jerk

Nobody is going to buy your emulator kike.

Kek, this.

Also the Russians are now selling an enhanced x86 QEMU backend for the Pi for a couple bucks that's 10x faster than the open source one. They plan on releasing their code yearly, which is awfully nice of them.

Also could it be ported to POWER?

Apparently you're an 80s DOS games afficionado.

More like 80's hardware, rather than DOS in particular. My last nice computer was Amiga. Last good game console was Sega Genesis.

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So why exactly was a focus on quality and taking the customer seriously (or at least not considering him an idiot by default) abandoned in the 90s?

They killed off the affordable competition (Atari, Amiga, etc.) and shoved nasty, bloated Win95 PCs with SSM botnet down everyone's throat. That was the very end of the hobbyist computer scene. All that's left now is microcontrollers, but you actually need a nasty PC to do anything with those, so it's not quite the same.

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You mean SMM (System Management Mode)?

Also if Carmack started to work on the Amiga rather than PC in the late 80s (supposedly Amiga was recommended to him but he did not have enough funds to buy one so he chose to rent a PC instead) and if id made games like Wolf3D and Doom for Amiga rather than PC, things could have worked out quite differently (as they did, Doom actually was pretty much the penultimate nail in the Amiga's coffin, second only to the collapse of Commodore the following year).

Doom would not have changed much. The Amiga was already showing its age at the time and Commodore was not willing to update it or license it to companies who were willing to update it. And by the time Escom bought the IP things were already too late.

When IBM stumbled into PC scene, every competitor were shooting themselves in the foot, IBM didn't need to kill anyone.

And then IBM themselves were immediately blown the fuck out by various cheapo clones, it is really hilarious when you think about it.

IBM wanted to abandon the PC for their new PS/2 system, while the market said "nah, we wanna stick to PC now, be it with or without you IBM".

Apple existed, so that's wrong. But everyone in business world standardised on IBM PC because "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", and also it had Visicalc. But it was expensive compared to other computers (except Apple Mac and actual Unix workstations). Even some 8-bit computers had better graphics and sound capabilities.
Anyway, they pushed the shitty Win95 hard and OS/2 didn't make it despite being much better. It's like they settled on the worst possible platform.

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