There has been a running attempt by several people to harness the power of the latest versions of QEMU, along wit the work by balaton to bring several Amiga boards into this software to run OS4, and now pair them with the magic of GPU passthrough so that the emulated system could see a real, supported GPU and take advantage of software like CANDI and Warp3DNova. Theoretically, with a powerful-enough host CPU (like a high-end intel or Amd Ryzen), the emluated PPC could meet or exceed even an Amiga x5000.

I myself attempted to do this with Qemu 9.x, specifying the Pegasos2 architecture and balaton’s Pegasos2 instructions and bboot bootloader. I tested with an Sapphire R9 270x, and two RX 580’s (XFX and MSI). Only the MSI Rx 580 actually started the emulated Amiga on a separate monitor with the RX card being set for VFIO passthrough. Unfortunately, the performance was actually worse in my case than the default sm501 emulated card. According to balaton, this was probably due to how the OS was handling the on-card memory. There were some suggested workarounds but I wasn’t able to get them to work. Someone claimed in a thread on Amigans.net that they got it working with an MSI R9 270x.

However, balaton has been hard at work updating bboot and Qemu and now the system of choise appears to be emulating an AmigaOne XE board. A new thead (here) shows someone making a cheap, older Intel i5 board (3rd gen I5) along with an MSI HD 7750 card work just right. He’s even tested some Amiga 3d Games to work with decent performance.

Here is a video showing it in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-sQbCyh8PA

Setting up VFIO gpu passthrough isn’t easy. While I eventually settled on using ArchLinux (supposedly has the best support for VFIO passthrough), I initially used a video from KSK Royal on Youtube to set it up (he’s using Ubuntu):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aHQbg9j_gI&pp=ygUOa3NrIHJveWFsIHZmaW8%3D

Other issues were not being able to use the GPU card because it was in an IOMMU group with other items. All have to be passed through to the emulated environment, which led to me to the ACS Patch and other complicated things. In the end, I did get one working, as I said, but the slowness had to do with that particular GPU.

I’m now going to try the same GPU that was used in the video above, even though it is lower performance than the RX580. I’m sticking with Pegasos2 for now, as I cannot find any Amiga dealers that are selling the AmigaOne version.

Seriously, why can’t we have a single DISC for all machines? Was the bootloader issues that hard? I’ve purchased OS4.1fe for Classic Amiga (with PowerUp cards for WinUAE), Pegasos2 and Sam 460. I think I’ve supported this OS enough so far.

Whenever the AmigaONE versions come back in stock, I’ll probably be ordering that one too.

Hope you guys have good efforts trying to get an emulated PowerPC Amiga system with real hardware working!