[HN Gopher] BasiliskII Macintosh 68k Emulator Ported to ESP32-P4...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       BasiliskII Macintosh 68k Emulator Ported to ESP32-P4 / M5Stack Tab5
        
       Author : rcarmo
       Score  : 71 points
       Date   : 2026-01-11 12:02 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | swiftcoder wrote:
       | How performant is this - are we able to achieve similar speeds as
       | an actual 68k Mac on embedded hardware?
        
         | iamflimflam1 wrote:
         | The P4 is pretty high spec with a 400MHz dual-core RISC-V
        
           | cardanome wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | vardump wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | rasz wrote:
           | Everything is coming from PSRAM including frame buffer (at 15
           | fps) so performance is going to be abysmal.
        
             | vardump wrote:
             | You should be able to cache hot code and data in the SRAM.
             | Although it'd significantly increase complexity.
        
       | anthk wrote:
       | VMac would be lighter.
        
       | bArray wrote:
       | 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...
        
         | nottorp wrote:
         | Yeah, the first thing I thought of when seeing this was "how
         | long till this tablet thingy will be out of stock everywhere?".
        
       | zeckalpha wrote:
       | Hoping rePalm ends up there, too!
       | https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=27.%20rePalm
        
       | jhbadger wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | stonogo wrote:
       | I note that the vide coding tools managed to keep the license
       | headers in individual files, but the COPYING file containing the
       | GPL2 has not made the transition.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2026-01-11 23:01 UTC)