Gamester17
2008-08-22, 19:23
Development to port XBMC for Linux to PPC (PowerPC) have begun and source code patches for that is available, however these developers are only focusing on XBMC for Linux, not XBMC for Mac (and no one on Team-XBMC even own a PowerPC based Mac), thus outside/third-party developers are needed to port XBMC to PPC so that is can be compiled and run on all PowerPC based Mac's out there.
For more information please see these threads in the XBMC forum:
http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=34439
http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=32320
http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=35435
Are there any C++ programmers out there who owns a PPC Mac yourselves and might be interested in this?
Gamester17
2008-09-25, 20:25
PPC (PowerPC) emulators could possibly make porting easier for those developers who do not actually have PPC hardware:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_virtual_machines
QEMU emulator looks most promising at a first glance(?) ???
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMU
http://bellard.org/qemu/QEMU is an open source software simulator for x86 that can emulate systems with processors of various architectures, including 386, x86_64, ARM, MIPS, PowerPC and Sparc. For ARM, two emulated platforms are available -- an older "Integrator" platform, and a newly-added "Versatile" platform.
The new Versatile platform includes a SCSI hard disk controller, Ethernet card, and graphical display. According to french Debian developer Aurelien Jarno (who published a HOW-TO about installing Debian or another Linux distributions on the open-source QEMU emulator), when run on an Athlon 64 3800+, running under QEMU can perform 20 percent faster than the ARM-based LinkSys NSLU2 (http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS6152296875.html) (an inexpensive network-attached storage appliance that is commonly pressed into service as a full Debian ARM development target (http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS6152296875.html)).
Jarno's HOW-TO begins by describing how to download and install QEMU from CVS, to ensure that the latest Versatile platform support is included. He then configures QEMU to emulate a 10GB hard drive, and downloads a publicly shared Versatile kernel that he created (Debian ARM does not yet include a kernel that supports the image, he says). Next he downloads Debian's "Etch" installer, and bootstraps the installer using a qemu-system-arm command.
Jarno's HOW-TO next describes several harmless error messages, leading ultimately to the emulated ARM system's first boot. Jarno's HOW-TO completes the basic installation by installing a more complete kernel.
Jarno's HOW-TO goes on to explore a few more advanced topics, such as running an Xorg server, increasing the amount of RAM to the maximum supported size of 256MB, and setting up a network bridge to allow the emulated system access to the Internet. The HOW-TO closes with a list of additional resources.
The full HOW-TO can be found here (link) (http://www.aurel32.net/info/debian_arm_qemu.php) was first published in 2006
Is it possible to run powerpc OSX in QEMU?
I didn't turn up anything with a google search, but if it is, I'd try it out and see if this port looks feasible.
I'm not looking forward to the idea of software opengl rendering on an emulator.