Re: new version of lisaem?

gilles wrote:
>> G4 running at 500MHz to barely function. 1GHz G4's are really wanted.
>> It'll probably work on a Pismo, but it'll be more like crawling than
>> running, and it certainly likes a lot of RAM.
>>
>
> On the other hand... IDLE was developped on a P166MMX with 64Mb of RAM
> and can be compiled on macosx (but the Apple "one button mouse" needs
> a minor modification, need to map a key to call emulator menu) :)
>
Ah, yes, very good.

LisaEm was first developed on a 166MHz Alpha Multia with 64MB of RAM, then moved to a SPARCStation IPC which ran at 40MHz and had only 32MB of memory, then moved to a SPARCStation5 at 170Mhz, then an Ultra2, then an Ultra 30, a SparcBook 3GX, then for quite a while, plain old Cygwin on a Thinkpad R30 with 256MB, then a Winbook (P3 at 650Mhz with 256MB) under coLinux, then a Thinkpad T40 under coLinux, and most recently a MacBook Pro.

Portability is, after all important.

With the exception of the Generator CPU code, and the LZW compression code for DART, it was written from scratch, not based on anyone else's code. And even the Generator CPU core, was heavily overhauled to run with LisaEm.

Not that it matters very much, but the limitation on the PPC Mac (and the memory requirements of the current versions) are a function of wxWidgets.
It certainly ran at full speed on the PIII Winbook running at 650MHz. Yes kids, C++ frameworks are wonderful things, but they do come at a price, with which I'm quite frankly happy.

It might be nice to have LisaEm run on a 166Mhz Pentium box, but I do have more modern equipment for daily use, so why impose an artificial limit? Were I to rip out the C++ code and put back the old raw Xlib code, it would run on those boxes too, but why go back to making it look like a 1991 application?

As is, LisaEm runs on FreeBSD, various distros of Linux, OS X (both PPC and Intel), and Windows.
It probably runs or can be easily ported to anywhere that wxWidgets runs that has enough resources, and has a proper user interface, and even supports ImageWriter printer emulation.

And yes, it supports either a one button mouse, or a two button mouse, though I'm unsure of why that's of any importance to anyone. Received on 2009-08-19 10:38:22