Developer Guide

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Basilisk II
  • Basilisk II Source Code
  • Basilisk II Emulation
  • Basilisk II Technical Document
• SheepShaver
• Emulation
  • 68K instruction set and architecture
  • Power PC instruction set and architecture
  • Macintosh OS Internals
  • Emulation and Virtualization in general
  • Dynamic Binary Translation
• External Resource
• Credits

Introduction

This is the developer guide for macemu project Basilisk II and SheepShaver. It is intended to serve as a centralized place for Macintosh enthusiasts to share their findings and knowledge of Motorola 68K and IBM Power PC emulation.

Neither Basilisk II nor SheepShaver have good technical documentation. For example, with SheepShaver, unless you dig very deep into the code or search on the Internet, you have no clue what guest CPU it is trying to emulate. This posed a serious problem for maintaining these emulators in the future.

All notes and insights are welcome, regardless of the level of technical knowledge. We believe that everyone knows a little bit here and there. Given enough time and involvement from the community, we will gain a bigger and better picture of what is going on inside Basilisk II and SheepShaver.

Basilisk II

Basilisk II Source Code

• Structure Overview
• Compilation Guide

Basilisk II Emulation

• CPU Core Emulation Analysis
• ROM Analysis in Basilisk-II Emulation
• Peripheral Hardware Emulation Analysis

Basilisk II Technical Document

• Basilisk II original technical manual, Christian Bauer
• Technical details of sheep_net module in Linux, Ricky Zhang

SheepShaver

• TODO

Emulation

68K instruction set and architecture

• Motorola M68000 Family Programmer's Reference Manual
• Assembly Language Programming for the 68000 Family

Power PC instruction set and architecture

• TODO

Macintosh OS Internals

• Inside Macintosh Volume VI. This books provides details in System 7.

Emulation and Virtualization in general

• A Youtube video explains how emulation works

Dynamic Binary Translation

• QEMU, a Fast and Portable Dynamic Translator, Fabrice Bellard
• Porting the QEMU virtualization software to MINIX 3, Erik van der Kouwe. Note Section 2 Virtualization provides a good survey on virtualization and binary translation.
• QEMU Tiny Code Generator technical doc. Note this design is not employed in Basilisk II emulation core.

External Resource

• macemu upstream Git repo
• emaculation forum

Credits

Contributors to the developer guide:

• Ricky Zhang
• Mike