Hi André,
adding more PPC developers.
On 16/4/25 10:42, André from Negmaster wrote:
First of all many thanks for your work on PPC emulation.
I would like to request SCSI/PCI passthrough to MacOS9 if possible.
I spent the last two days trying to get this working to no avail. To me
it seems QEMU can't do that. The PPC documentation is missing
information about passthrough. I would like to see some more information
there. Because i am still not sure if it would work or not. I passed all
hurdles, like IOMMU groups, IRQ issues etc...but still no SCSI card or
scanner in the system profiler.
Something like a HTML table that would describe the possibilities of PPC
emulation vs I386/x64 would be very helpful.
I would like to point out that passthrough is particularly important for
OS9, as we have a quite big community of people using old filmscanners
(more than 700 people). These scanners were very expensive and are no
longer made but require OS8/9 to run on the software they came with.
Sometimes they cost up to €150.000 and they are not supported by modern
3rd party software like Vuescan or Silverfast. Thus they are not able to
run on modern operating systems.
Many of these scanners were trashed during the upcoming digital camera
era in the 2000s and i'm doing my very best to save and repair the
remaining devices.
QEMU could be very helpful here in terms of sustainability and economy.
Also because people often don't want to deal with old G3 or G4
computers. Those are getting difficult to maintain, take a lot of space
and are not really energy efficient.
The TLDR is that this way QEMU would be used in a productive environment
for earning people's living (film scanning labs and film photographers).
So in a way more meaningful than just for retro leisures.
