Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Since old Macs also use a PPC processor, I was wondering if it would be possible to write a much faster emulator for PowerPC.
I know you would lose much of the optimized code, but there's already a port in development for ARM. And wouldn't it be much easier to write a PPC port? Most code wouldn't need to be recompiled, all you would need is a VM?...

I found some people on the Web saying it would could be possible, but it hadn't been done yet. And I wonder if the potential user base is just too small, as few people own them compared to phones and PCs. But is it possible? Is it practical? Will it mesh well with the existing Dolphin? And will it be any use?

Edit: The Imac g5 is significantly faster than both the GC and Wii CPUs.

Is it possible? Yes.

Any emulator can theoretically be ported to almost any platform as long as it has a general purpose microprocessor with large enough registers and enough memory (there might be other requirements but I'm not going to think too hard about this).

Would it be any faster?

Hard to say without a dev weighing in on this but I'm going to guess no based on what the cxbx dev has said about emulating the xbox on x86 platforms. There is still a huge amount of overhead even if the ISA is similar. And you're dealing with a much slower cpu which should effectively negate the advantage of more efficient execution.

Also I'm 99% sure you would still need a JIT recompiler. A VM isn't going to cut it.

Will it be of any use?

No. How many people do you know that are still using PPC macs?

Even if a JIT wasn't necessary and the code could run natively, the CPU requirements for graphical emulation would kill that advantage pretty easily.