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BasiliskII Macintosh 68k Emulator Ported to ESP32-P4 / M5Stack Tab5

Looking at the M5Stack Tab5 IoT Development Kit [1] based on the ESP32-P4 - it's a really nice piece of kit.

[1] https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5stack-tab5-iot-developme...

6 hours agobArray

Yeah, the first thing I thought of when seeing this was "how long till this tablet thingy will be out of stock everywhere?".

3 hours agonottorp

Pity that this isn't for the Cardputer (a M5Stack device that includes a built in (tiny) screen and keyboard), although it might be impractical on it.

29 minutes agojhbadger

How performant is this - are we able to achieve similar speeds as an actual 68k Mac on embedded hardware?

8 hours agoswiftcoder

At 8 MHz, a 68k can execute at most 2M instructions per second. So the answer is going to be yes, if this manages to execute one 68k instruction per ~200 cycles.

I think executing an instruction is going to be closer to 20-50 cycles than 200, so it should be much faster than a real 68k CPU.

I think performance is likely to be in the ballpark of a 68040 @20 MHz, but that's just a guess. This would leave 20 cycles for each emulated instruction. With JIT you could reach 200 MHz+ comparable speeds.

6 hours agovardump

Everything is coming from PSRAM including frame buffer (at 15 fps) so performance is going to be abysmal.

5 hours agorasz

You should be able to cache hot code and data in the SRAM. Although it'd significantly increase complexity.

4 hours agovardump

The P4 is pretty high spec with a 400MHz dual-core RISC-V

6 hours agoiamflimflam1

Especially as there is a decent working BasiliskII port for the PlayStation Portable with its 333MHz single-core MIPS CPU.

So this should be much easier.

2 hours agocardanome

VMac would be lighter.