Risc OS on x86.

I know it sounds silly but it seems also pretty interesting, an x86 port without many changes would technically be possible by like running it on an existing kernel like linux or bsd but design the distro to virtualize RISC OS. There’s a lot of existing stuff for them kernels so it might just simplify and speed up RISC OS ports. Cheers

Have you tried Virtual RiscPC?

Or the Linux Port which can run on x86 linux, but prefers ARM versions?

Yes, I thought of the Linux port too, Andy. Didn’t know it also ran on x86/x64 too though, interesting!

RISC OS (operating system and applications) has a lot of hand-crafted ARM assembler which I guess has to be run under emulation (qemu?). This means it would be rather difficult to run it at any speed on x86 hardware, although it’d be interesting to know just how fast qemu is at executing arm code on a modern 4ghz intel/AMD CPU.

It’s QEMU. One of the darkest and most ancient of magics. Of course there’s a performance hit for the ARM emulation, but it still performs it’s magic to pass on system calls etc.

MorphOS is heading to x86_64. Runs ppc,M68K and native apps. All because of various very fast JIT emulators.

I think that a baremetal ARM simulation on x86_64 would be VERY interesting.