I think thats a pretty big achievement that it runs at all on the wrong instruction set. RISC-V development really seems to have come far
Were they emulating the x86 code in realtime, or pre-translating it to RISC-V in the way that Apple’s Rosetta 2 does for ARM? If the former, that is indeed impressive performance.
I don’t even care. The fact that we’re at a point where it runs means a whole bunch of "step one"s have been succefully taken.
Besides Box64, which was used to emulate x86 instructions in general, Wine and DXVK helped fill the gaps using Linux instead of Windows.
Believe it or not, the article answers that question. The linked blog post from the devs has even more detail.
The original blog post (linked in the article) refers to this as a DynaRec, i.e. a dynamic recompiler. So it’s not exactly emulating, but nor is it the ahead-of-time recompilation that Rosetta 2 can do.
I’d love to know the power draw, the article doesn’t mention it (that I could see).
It’s pretty nuts to be able to take something as complex as a video game and to run it on unintended hardware.
PS3 next?
If rpcs3 uses a dynarec, then one would have to specifically be made for RISC-V. The interpreter can probably already run right now.