Re: Future of ELKS

Gregg C Levine
2004-05-29T16:58:37Z

Hello from Gregg C Levine
Nice to see this list is still alive and kicking.
First off all, the 6502 processor is still alive and sqawking. I won't quote
the site name for it, since it will be given later in the thread.
And second, what's the satus of the ELKS code stored on the PlanetMirror
mirror? Or for that matter somewhere on the MIT server? Or even the Germany
Linux Labs site?

But a question does hit me, Chad, if your the same person who's early work
was last seen on the MIT server, what is the status of it? This is the not
really Linux, and certainly not ELKS stuff, from the period that started
when Linus started Linux.
Gregg C Levine obiwanthejediknight atsign att dot net
<This signature will be replaced, pending an approval from the Jedi Council.
>
----- Original Message -----
From: "Chad Page" <cpage@silcom.com>
To: "Stefan de Konink" <skinkie@xs4all.nl>
Cc: "David Given" <dg@cowlark.com>; <linux-8086@vger.kernel.org>
Sent: Thursday, May 20, 2004 11:39 PM
Subject: Re: Future of ELKS

>
> On Fri, 21 May 2004, Stefan de Konink wrote:
>
> > > > Hey, someone know if a 8086 is fast enough run emulators for those
old
> > > > 8-bit game consoles? 8)
> > >
> > > Nah. A 4.77MHz 8086 does not get a lot of work done. Say you want to
> > > emulate a 2MHz 6502, such as the BBC Micro... this means you have
about
> > > two and a half cycles to emulate each 6502 cycle. Just not possible.
>
> Yup... the memory access speed is *much* slower for instance.
> When I was working on ELKS little tweaks which wouldn't be noticable on
> even the Pentiums of the day - let alone today's HW - were *very*
> noticable on the PC.
>
> > Totally offtopic but I would like to know it. What if an entiere program
> > gets preprocessed, lets say optimized to run on a 8086. So a program
reads
> > binary, disassembles, rewrites to 8086 code, reassembles and run.
> > Or am I talking garbage :S (I thought emulators did a JIT thing...)
>
> qemu does that on the fly - it usually outputs about 10
> instructions per emulated one, in my experience. J. Meyer has stated that
> an 2ghz Athlon 64 runs at about the speed of a 200mhz ppc in qemu, for
> example. Might be possible to get a better code ratio against an 8-bit
> system - Intel had direct code converters from 8080 code, but even then it
> might be tricky. But you would also have to emulate the graphics
> hardware, which challenges faster systems quite a bit!
>
> It'd be interesting to emulate a high-density p-code system on an
> 8086 to fit more code into ELKS, but it'd likely be too slow in practical
> use.
>
> - Chad
>
> > Btw. If a mirror of the hacked elks code is needed, please give a shout.
> >
> >
> > Stefan
> >
> > -
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