RPCEmu on Apple Silicon

I am having a first look at running the macOS RPCEmu builds on Apple Silicon.

RPCEmu-Recompiler does run but very very very slowly. This will be how JIT and Rosetta 2 work together.

RPCEmu-Interpreter does rather better and runs faster on the M1 MacBook Air under Rosetta 2 than it does natively on the iMac Pro. (This is a claim that Apple makes.)

               MIPS    romark   RPC%
iMacPro.         83    114150    64%
MacBook Air     124    149224    83%

So far I have not worked out how to build a native ARM RPCEmu-Interpreter on the MacBook Air, x86 code in the source is a bit of problem.

So far I have not worked out how to build a native ARM RPCEmu-Interpreter on the MacBook Air, x86 code in the source is a bit of problem

Using the right source helps! A build on the M1 MacBook Air does succeed but is for Intel.

So it’s a recompiled emulator, possibly with emulated emulation elements. Impressive if it works at all, more so if it’s not glacially slow.

So far I have not worked out how to build a native ARM RPCEmu-Interpreter on the MacBook Air

I managed to get it to build natively using Qt6. It now gets 108% using RISC OS 5.29. Idles at the desktop at 185mips. I noticed the ‘Shift’ key doesn’t do anything but apart from that seems to work OK. Still slow though without a arm64 recompiler.

Qt6 didn’t go too well here.

djp@MacBookAir qt5 % /Users/djp/Qt/6.0.0/clang_64/bin/qmake rpcemu.pro
…
Project ERROR: Unknown module(s) in QT: multimedia
djp@MacBookAir qt5 % 

I used Qt 5.15.2.

I used Qt 5.15.2.

Is that the arm64 version. I couldn’t get it to build natively but Qt6 did.

Project ERROR: Unknown module(s) in QT: multimedia

You haven’t got qtmultimedia installed. :-)

You haven’t got qtmultimedia installed.

It is conspicuously absent! As far as I can see it is not included in Qt6.

OTOH :-

I noticed the ‘Shift’ key doesn’t do anything

Shift key does work here both in terms of Shift-Start giving the Data Directory dialogue and Capitals in Edit.

It is conspicuously absent! As far as I can see it is not included in Qt6.

I built Qt6 from source as arm64. First qtbase and then qtmultimedia.

Shift key does work here both in terms of Shift-Start g

The shift works OK when running RPCEmu with Rosetta using Qt5 but not when built as arm64 using Qt6.

// question. Do you manage to compile the latest version for RISC OS? And does the keyboard could work now?

Do you manage to compile the latest version for RISC OS?

The latest version 0.9.3 builds and runs on RISC OS. Idles at about 55 Mips on a Rpi 400 @2.4GHz. There’s still no sound, network or keyboard input support.

Damned :) Could the macOS patch help (they made a specific file for keyboard support as they did have the same problem as us; it’s not portable, but readable)?