..,on a Mac? - AVS Forums

JFASI

14th November 2006 01:21 UTC

..,on a Mac?
I'm trying to make the switch to a Mac/Linux dual boot thing, and I have a PPC computer, so XP is out of the question. IS there some form of AVS that runs on either? I know the answer if probably no, but I think it's worth a try.

Mr_Nudge

14th November 2006 03:48 UTC

you can get virtualpc for mac which lets you run pc programs.

JFASI

14th November 2006 04:39 UTC

Interesting. It's paid, from what I can tell, though. However, I think it could be worth buying. Do you think AVS will run massively slower than it would an a native PC?

Mr_Nudge

15th November 2006 03:41 UTC

shouldn't do since it's all processor based. and if avs is the only thing you'd need a windows platform for, then i don't think it's worth it.

Warrior of the Light

15th November 2006 07:47 UTC

AVS needs windows components to run. simple as that.

If you're going for a mac/linux dual, I know that Jaak and Mattfury use(d) a windows emulator under linux and claim (/claimed.. it's been some years since that was posted.. too lazy to search) that they even got more FPS. maybe they can help you?

jheriko

15th November 2006 11:24 UTC

Emulating a CPU is a slow business. The way I see it,you need to dereference something and call something per instruction at the least, so thats a maximum of a third of the CPU speed already. Ever wondered why NES/SNES/Playstation emulators are so slow when the hardware they used is orders of magnitude less powerful than even a 5 year old PC?

I use VMWare on Windows to emulate Linux and I notice that raw performance of Linux on my Windows box is noticeably less than it would be if it was installed stand alone on its own partition etc... VMWare doesn't emulate the CPU so this extra slowdown is just from Windows being in the background. Whatever you end up using will need to emulate the CPU so you are look at (in the BEST case scenario) less than 33% performance in AVS.

Use Wine to emulate windows under *nix (OS X counts as *nix in my book) you will get some results, but it won't run AVS all that nicely.

JFASI

15th November 2006 21:16 UTC

I just need it to run decently, so that I can continue developing presets on a mac/linux. I could also use wine, though.

jheriko

16th November 2006 11:25 UTC

AVS barely runs decently on its target platform. Good luck. :p

MaTTFURY

19th November 2006 12:20 UTC

From what I've experienced from a fairly slow P4 (l2;128kb cache), wine on linux emulates x86 programs fairly well, but because you want to run a PPC mac, there is no chance in fucking hell of you ever running windows programs with wine, on a furthernote, emulating Winamp/avs on Linux using wine OMFGPWNZOR, I got around 60fps - 80fps rather than 30 -40fps on this slow processor (linux = pwnage).

But I had a look around there is a commercial alternative to using M$ products on mac (not recommended) you can use CrossOver for Mac. I dont know how well it works or anything, so don't ask. :)

edit:
But in combination with QEMU, I'm told that it is possible but im not entirely sure so go work on it on yourself :D

ASD5A

19th November 2006 12:27 UTC

mattfury: if you had read only two lines of that homepage youre linking too, you would have noticed jfasi cant use the product becaue he has a ppc mac

Kar-mAVS

3rd December 2006 05:42 UTC

you could try iemulator http://www.iemulator.com/ Bochs (free) http://bochs.sourceforge.net/getcurrent.html, or as said before, virtual PC

I'd keep an eye on darWine (in development) http://darwine.opendarwin.org/index.php & Crossover Office (intel only ATM, but it works almost perfectly (im using it now) http://www.codeweavers.com/products/

Warrior of the Light

11th December 2006 22:23 UTC

*bump*
[link] Just stumbled on this fossil in another thread. you could at least try if it works.

jheriko

12th December 2006 10:31 UTC

Re: ..,on a Mac?

Originally posted by JFASI
..PPC computer...

evallib creates a load of x86/x87 or MMX assembler instructions in memory for each function. When it compiles the code it copies and pastes these together into one huge block of code. When it needs to run the code it executes these instructions from memory.

In other words you need an x86 CPU with x87 and MMX instructions to be able run AVS on any platform without emulation. This basically covers Intel, AMD and the other, crappier, clones out there.

So for PPC you are truly stuffed and you need to use an emulator, which will slow everything down enormously as I described in my previous post.. after looking at various sites their benchmarks seem to agree with my intution that you will lose at least 66% of your CPU performance, most cases are actually substantially worse losing as much as 80% or 90% of the speed... this should come as no surprise to anyone who has used a console emulator though.

Please people, can we just accept that this is outside of the realms of possiblity? AVS running that slowly is just not worth it....

Intel is just so good... even Apple realised it in the end.

0verhaul

7th February 2007 06:40 UTC

This has nothing to do with PPC Mac, but I thought I'd mention the strangeness I found on Windows just developing alternate code for the expression evaluator: Even with debug mode, superscope-heavy presets had higher FPS--on occasion. Other times the frame delay throttled it to about 60FPS. But, for instance, I had the Tie Tunnel at over 300FPS, even though compiled into debug mode. Then on other runs it was barely reaching 40... Seems like the Windows sleep function is unreliable. But anyway, FPS seems to be a function of whether the sleep function works, not so much of how efficient the code is.