Mac OS 9 Lives
Mac OS 9 Discussion => Emulation => Topic started by: darthnVader on December 02, 2025, 01:22:51 PM
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After an extensive amount of modifying OpenBIOS and a few mods to qemu I was able to get PCI Passthrough of a GeForce 7800GT PCI-E card to work with Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.8.
Mostly everything is untested and there are a lot of bugs wot work out, but QE/CI are reported as working and I was able to confirm the ripple effect in Widgets does work.
Due to my motherboard having issues with passing a USB keyboard to the guest I have largely not been able to test 3D gaming, but I'll get those issues sorted over time as I have it.
This opens the door for much better graphics performance in emulation, I've also started work on Geforce 3 emulation and 3dfx voodoo2 emulation, but a host system is going to have to be 20x faster than the fastest systems we have today before 3D acceleration like OpenGL in hardware is going to be anything but a slide show even if I complete that much of GeForce 3 emulation.
Turns out that 3D acceleration on an emulated GPU is one of the most taxing things you can do even on a modern host CPU. Without drivers to offload OpenGL calls to the host system you are stuck with a slide show. That's why work on PCI Passthrough is vital to emulation of PPC systems.
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Wow, LMK when you get a PCI audio Interface (like 2496) to work via pass-thru, this would finally make a full working DAW a reality; currently all my "Virtual DAWs" do not perform with "real hardware"
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Wow, LMK when you get a PCI audio Interface (like 2496) to work via pass-thru, this would finally make a full working DAW a reality; currently all my "Virtual DAWs" do not perform with "real hardware"
Mostly that should work out of the box, maybe if the cards do Bus Mastering or some other funky PCI functions I don't fully understand it would need a few mods, but the cards do not have option ROMs or I2C busses that require firmware( OpenBIOS ) level mods.
Mostly the OS's runtime drivers for Audio cards are going to take care of everything for you.
Had you ever tried to pass a PCI audio card to qemu-system-ppc? It would likely help is a I finally track down the issue with OS 9 freezing on access to the 2nd CPU, but I've got a pretty good idea what the issue is now, just need time to go back over my work and make sure the interrupt-parent is routed through Uni-North and not directly to Mac-io interrupt-controler.