Recent Posts

21

Applications and Porting / Re: Arcade Emulators RetroArch

« Last post by MauryG5 on June 02, 2026, 04:21:17 am »

Hi, what currently works in RetroArch is FinalBurnArcade. With that, you can use Mame ROMs, which perform much better than our own Mame due to the usual lack of optimization on Power. I can't tell you what the Alpha version is, I don't know it. I tried installing the Naomi/Dreamcast FlyCast emulator; I mentioned it in another post a while ago with Classic. We managed to compile and install it, but it wouldn't run because of the part of the C++ code related to vector instructions, which are obviously only available for X86 and ARM. We had to tell the code to ignore that part, but unfortunately, I tried to run games like Capcom VS SNK 2, but unfortunately, it wouldn't run. We tried bypassing that part in every way, but it didn't work. The part in VSX/Altivec isn't there and would have to be written from scratch for Power. Yesterday I also started Super Model, a Sega Model 3 emulator, but unfortunately there are several problems there too. In that case, the story is paradoxical considering that the original card ran with PPC and therefore it should have been a walk in the park for Power, but unfortunately the usual parts written on X86 to optimize the code create a big problem for us because we necessarily have to go through those and obviously Power doesn't understand anything and we would need the JIT. Sega Rally 2 started, the audio is perfect but unfortunately there are obvious graphical glitches and it's not good in general.

22

Applications and Porting / Re: Arcade Emulators RetroArch

« Last post by power9mm on June 01, 2026, 10:23:10 am »

What about final burn alpha? That’s the emulator that was used for ggpo

23

Applications and Porting / Re: [GAMES] dosbox-staging -- one of the best choice for DOS gaming

« Last post by MPC7500 on June 01, 2026, 08:32:35 am »

I don't think that's the reason. AI slop detected.
Why can't you reply to them? Same thing with box64.

24

Applications and Porting / Re: [GAMES] dosbox-staging -- one of the best choice for DOS gaming

« Last post by tle on June 01, 2026, 02:26:57 am »

dosbox-staging has officially removed PPC64LE JIT backend in 0.83.0 because they are unable to maintain the work without access to hardware.

So I've decided to fork the project to re-introduce this feature, see https://github.com/runlevel5/dosbox-staging-power/pull/2, the goal is to be able to produce a patch file for downstream packagers to re-introduce PPC64LE JIT.

25

Applications and Porting / Arcade Emulators RetroArch

« Last post by MauryG5 on May 31, 2026, 05:39:43 am »

Good morning everyone, I've been wanting to improve the performance of old arcade games on Power for a while, but as was clear by now, there are some limitations with MAME due to the fact that there is no version optimized for Power, obviously, so as soon as you get to games like Street Fighter 3 from 1998/99, everything starts to slow down, unfortunately. Speaking with Gemini, I discovered that with Retroarch, it was possible to get much better performance because it doesn't work like MAME, which emulates every single cycle of the old CPUs and therefore puts a lot of work on the CPU. Having no optimization, it starts to crash, but it manages the emulation differently and more optimally. At that point, we took the sources and rebuilt Retroarch for Power, and to my great surprise, I installed SF3 and now the game runs great compared to MAME. So in the next few days I'll try other old arcade games that ran poorly on MAME to see how they perform on Retroarch, but I have to say I'm very satisfied with the result achieved.

It wasn't easy to find all the sources directly because GitHub seems to have put usernames and passwords on certain sources. After building the main RetroArch, we also had to rebuild the part that loads the actual arcade emulator because when we went to look for the cores, they said they were unavailable.

26

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Fedora 44 officially released!

« Last post by MauryG5 on May 30, 2026, 10:13:40 am »

After much fumbling with Gemini, which is also trial and error, we finally found the right path. Every new kernel Fedora installs puts a string with $ in the boot file, and petitboot can't read that file, resulting in an initrd error. We removed that string, and apparently the kernel is working properly again. We figured this out because it had me compare the 7.0.10 boot files with those of the rescue build, which actually works. That's when Gemini told me that that string is confusing petitboot.

27

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] JIT support for Firefox

« Last post by tle on May 30, 2026, 09:20:29 am »

Chiming in to say I've been testing a Fedora build of v152 that has not hiccuped once and finally feels like a full-featured browser. It's slower than Chromium on the same hardware - the Kraken JS test indicated around 1200ms on Chromium, and a skosh over 2100ms on Firefox - but for everyday usage I'm quite happy. Thanks for this!

The port has more rooms for improvements but for now I refrain from introducing further changes in order to get it to a stable / well tested state for upstreaming

28

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Fedora 44 officially released!

« Last post by MauryG5 on May 29, 2026, 03:30:42 pm »

After a long time, I decided to put Fedora back among my distros to use on Power. I reinstalled it from scratch and I actually noticed the great step forward that Fedora has made on Power, responsive, fluid, made really well now as a desktop. The 7.0.9 kernel was installed when I installed it, a few days ago I installed 7.0.10, in the grub update it tells me in yellow therefore a warning, that it had found the Debian and Ubuntu kernels, normal I say, I also have those currently mounted and it's not the first time I have all 3 of them. The fact is that as soon as I reboot the new Kernel 7.0.10, from petitboot it tells me an initramfs error... I say, but how come I just updated the kernel and it doesn't work anymore? What the hell is going on? I had just decided to put Fedora back and already the problems are starting, is it possible? Now I'm wondering, having given that warning when it found the kernels of the other two, did it mean that it's running out of memory, given the error, in petitboot or is there another problem that prevents me from booting Fedora with both 7.0.9 (which no longer works) and 7.0.10. It only works with the rescue mode at the moment. I tried having it ignore the other kernels, I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the 7.0.10 kernel, I tried reinstalling some parts but nothing works. Any ideas?

29

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] JIT support for Firefox

« Last post by Hasturtium on May 28, 2026, 10:36:29 am »

Chiming in to say I've been testing a Fedora build of v152 that has not hiccuped once and finally feels like a full-featured browser. It's slower than Chromium on the same hardware - the Kraken JS test indicated around 1200ms on Chromium, and a skosh over 2100ms on Firefox - but for everyday usage I'm quite happy. Thanks for this!

30

Applications and Porting / Re: Porting Overte and QTWebEngine

« Last post by tle on May 28, 2026, 08:59:30 am »

Thanks for sharing. Looks like a very cool project. I am not familiar with Qt so even if I want to lend you a helping hand, I am unsuitable for the job. Having said that I am more than happy to help with testing or review any changes that might related to V8 (as I have a bit of exposure to Chromium side)