It was only a few weeks ago that we got a massively improved Alpha emulator, capable of running VMS, Windows 2000, and Tru64, including X11 support and a variety of other exciting features. Today, we’ve got another major emulation milestone (update: sadly, with “AI” support, so odds are this will fizzle out. Bummer!).
The emulation space is going crazy, after my previous post on Windows booting on DEC Alpha es40 emulator, there is now another huge breakthrough in the emulation of other non-x86 CPU emulation. Yufeng Gao with help from gdwnldsKSC (the man behind the updated es40-fork) has released version 0.1 of his Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots the Itanium version of Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP 64-bit. No OpenVMS or HP-UX yet and Linux/BSD also don’t boot. But Windows is amazing already.
↫ Remy van Elst
Much like Alpha hardware, Itanium hardware is quite hard to come by – especially Itanium workstations are a nightmare to find; I think I’ve only ever seen one or two Itanium workstation come up for sale on eBay in recent years, and their rarity obviously commanded hefty prices. The sooner we are able to run Itanium version of operating systems comfortably in a virtualised environment the better. As long-time OSNews readers know, my heart beats for HP-UX, but the Itanium versions of Windows and VMS would be of more interest to most people, I’m sure.
Excellent news.
I have an Itanium OpenVMS system that was donated to a place I use to work at and they gave it me. I sometimes fire it up and use DECWrite, this weird program that combines a word processor with SGML, kind of like FrameMaker.
Really good news on this stuff lately. When I was a kid, I got to see so much history I missed via emulation. The home market homogenized, and a lot of these middle years architectures never really got attention, then it seems like retrocomputing and homelab both took off around the same time, so workstation-class hardware is not in any way affordable any more
This is just insane. It was just few days ago when I was asking Gemini about possibility of someone working on Itanium emulator and it was very skeptical.
This is pretty cool, and a nice example of properly using LLMs to assist coding.
According to the author
I have also seen a recent Windows Alpha setup, and a bunch of older games with open source engines being ported to other platforms. It will be a real boon for software emulation and compatibility.
The other Qemu fork also mentioned in an update to the article is indeed slop, but the actual linked project makes no indication as such, nor does the author seems to state as such anywhere. Where’s the quote from?
Thom,
This was directly from this Twitter post:
https://nitter.net/x86corez/status/2078840799576379762
Thanks!
Anytime!