Dolphin for little-endian gnu/linux/PowerPc with kvm

[robyinno]

Soon will have affordable and powerfull Powerpc DevKit and nowadays we have already cheap used powerpc G4/G4 machine NVIDIA or with ATI based video card, so we want to port Dolphin to Powerpc architecture thanks to the virtualization ( and not the much slower emulation) of kvm.
Could you provide us the needed info for doing that? Or are you as Dolphin Team already working on that.

The Wii and GameCube are Powerpc based so make sense to support Dolphin on gnu/linux Powerpc architecture.

About the G4 virtualization here our post
http://techuman.wordpress.com/2013/09/12/powerpc-g4-virtualization-with-kvm/

[Sonicadvance1]

The Dolphin emulator makes assumptions /everywhere/ in the code that it is running on a little endian machine.
I looked towards gaining support for big endian in Dolphin a few years ago and it immediately hit roadblock after roadblock with big endian support.
It would be a massive undertaking with how large our codebase is.

[edit]
Not to mention we now require OpenGL 3.x and I'm not sure how many PowerPC hosts support that...
[/edit]

[lamedude]

G4 should be bi endian; IIRC G5 wasn't.

[robyinno]

Thank you for your answer, and I hope new energy will arrive in the
powerpc area, so this new energy could help the port on big-endian even
this great project!

Please help me to understand, Dolphin emulator is
wrote on C++, if I have understood well.
And the assumption everywhere
about little endian is related to emulation of powerpc processor and
other hardware components and convert big-endian data and code of
Wii/Gamecube games and OS to little-endian x86, is right?

It's difficult to isolate the dolphin code that take care about the emulation of the CPU between the emulation of the rest of the hardware?

Thanks again for your time.

(09-25-2013, 12:37 AM)Sonicadvance1 Wrote: The Dolphin emulator makes assumptions /everywhere/ in the code that it is running on a little endian machine.
I looked towards gaining support for big endian in Dolphin a few years ago and it immediately hit roadblock after roadblock with big endian support.
It would be a massive undertaking with how large our codebase is.

[edit]
Not to mention we now require OpenGL 3.x and I'm not sure how many PowerPC hosts support that...
[/edit]

---

That's very interesting!

(09-25-2013, 05:50 PM)lamedude Wrote: G4 should be bi endian; IIRC G5 wasn't.

[Sonicadvance1]

It's very difficult because throughout the entire ten years of the lifetime of the project, there hasn't been any thought put in to the source that it'll run on a big endian machine because no developers have thought/cared for it to run on a big endian system. It would take a while to do.

[NaturalViolence]

Why would this even be worth doing?

[delroth]

No.

[robyinno]

Look like true , G4 should run in little-endian mode , even powerpc 44x cores , and starting from ibm power7 processors .
And now Debian have started to support powerpc little-edian .

So now I come back to my initial intention that is I want to make it happen that Dolphin Emulator run on powerpc ( little-endian), I'm not able and I don't want to do alone, I'm searching people that like to do that, just for fun.
I thinks that the help of dolphin devs is foundamental, becouse is needed to substitute the emulation code of the powerpc machine code with the virtualization of it.

(09-25-2013, 05:50 PM)lamedude Wrote: G4 should be bi endian; IIRC G5 wasn't.

[delroth]

And we won't support anything like that because it's useless.

[Sonicadvance1]

Dolphin supports a "generic" build that builds with all the x86/ARM specific code cut out and leaves you with an interpreter. One could start from their and work their way up.