It finally happened! A few weeks ago, Toni Wilen, current maintainer (and all around extremely smart guy) of WinUAE, decided he wanted to add CyberStorm/Blizzard/CyberStormPPC/BlizzardPPC and WarpEngine RAM configurations to WinUAE (simulating RAM accessible on those boards).

Well, word got out, and people started asking if he was going to add PowerPC Emulated CPU to those emulated PPC boards. He initially said no. He’s said for a very long time he doesn’t like PowerPC and wasn’t interested.

However, he’s apparently the kind that wants to make his product the best it can be, probably likes a challenge and saw a jump in development donations specifically tied to PowerPC emulation.

QEMU was looked at and passed up, as it was harder to bring the code changes over than he wanted to do. However, the long-abandoned PearPC source code (the original MAC OSX emulator that was cut short when Apple jumped to Intel), provided a ready-made, drop in PPC cpu.

At first, it didn’t work, then slowly, WarpOS, and later PowerUP software began to work. The question was always if OS4.x and MorphOS for classics would work. There were issues, crashes, blank screens, etc, and Toni continued to deny that he would work specifically for that.

However, today, August 14, 2014, he posted two images about his next beta:

Here’s the original WinUAE2.9.0 thread where the PPC stuff originated.

Here’s the PPC specific thread

and here is the initial posting of the good news.