An anonymous reader writes "KernelTrap has an interesting article about an effort to add a Mach and Darwin binary compatibility layer to NetBSD. The project has evidently already made a fair amount of progress, currently working to stabilize the WindowServer emulation portion that will then allow NetBSD to run Mac OS X graphical applications."

prostoalex writes "Discover magazine provides an interesting insight into the future technologies that will emulate the human brain. While artificial intelligence supporters always considered direct emulation of brain functions too complex and preferred the top-down approach, some people are researching the ways human brain processes data. One of the interesting discoveries, mentioned in the article, is ability of the brain to re-architect the links as new information is added."

Jas Sandys-Lumsdaine writes "Bochs 2.0 has just been released - project lead Bryce Denney writes: "It's been a busy 6 months since our previous release! Bochs is now about twice as fast as version 1.4.1. Also, we can now emulate MMX instructions, SSE/SSE2, and even AMD x86-64 instructions if you turn on the appropriate configure options. The emulation improvements have paid off; several people have been able to install Windows XP recently." Excellent stuff."

GrosBill writes "Onlamp publishes one more paper about IRIX binary compatibility implementation on NetBSD. This time, this is about emulating IRIX native multithreading capabilities on NetBSD, which is quite interesting since NetBSD does not support native multithreading for its native binaries yet. The paper also covers some reverse engineering tricks: how to use a debugger to discover everything about IRIX multithreading."

Screaming Lunatic writes "nVidia has decided to include Linux and FreeBSD in their Unified Driver Architecture and offer more tech support. Sounds like great news for Linux developers and users if Linux drivers are released at the same time as Windows drivers. (The NV30 emulation driver for Linux was made available about 3 months later than for Windows) The big push is probably from big studios that use Linux tools such as Film Gimp. More info here ." Added by Heunique: You might want to look here if you are using the latest development kernel.

eefsee writes "The BBC announced that the Digital Domesday project which had become unusable has now been revived thanks to the successful emulation of a 1980's era Acorn computer. Folks at Leeds University and University of Michigan did the emulation work. This is just one early indication of how difficult it will be to maintain our digital heritage. Note that the printed Domesday Book, on which the digital project was modeled, is still quite accessible after almost 1000 years."

PizzaFace writes "SuSE Linux is developing a desktop Linux distribution that will allow Windows users to continue using (some of) their Windows applications, including Microsoft Office. The SuSE Linux Office Desktop will be available for $129 in January, and will include Acronis OS Selector for disk partitioning during installation and Codeweavers CrossOver Office for Windows API emulation."

Eugenia writes "This is great news for the Linux audio users! Reborn, a clone of the legendary ReBirth, has just been released. It provides software emulation for three of Roland Corporation's most famous electronic musical instruments. Also thrown in are four audio effects, individual mixers, a programmable sequencer and is fully compatible with the ReBirth .rbs song file format. To celebrate this release, OSNews runs an article presenting the most advanced professional, or semi-professional audio applications available today for the Linux platform." Most of the article consists of a list of audio software that can currently run on GNU/Linux systems. It's a pretty good list, but things like Cubase aren't there yet.

protonman writes "...and you thought emulation was for watching quicktime trailers, playing nintendo games, or just running calc.exe. Think again, Please welcome Winamp Visualization Plugins for XMMS, available now!"

c0d3po3t writes "An article on CNet tells us that two Singapore programmers have developed a system to allow one handheld operating system to run any application - Windows or Linux. Sounds like a good idea, but will their idea of network emulation be solid?" I can't really see the use for this except environments where your handheld has network access (the system is network based) and you have multiple legacy systems to deal with. It just doesn't sit right beyond the gee-whiz factor for me.

The Pi-Guy writes "It seems contradictory to Big N's massive anti-emulation stance to introduce the GBA as an emulator itself! An official N press release states that there will be "full classic NES games for download to the GBA"." Probably not so much Duck Hunt, but it sure would be sweet to get SMB3 on my GBA. Then I could go blind!

Alicia (ad454) writes "A new sub-notebook was released in Japan today, the JVC InterLink Victor MP-XP7210, which is one of the smallest notebooks around in recent years that does not have a Transmeta emulation processor. It has a true Pentium-III 800MHz processor, weighs only 885 grams, and is only 225x152x28mm in size. It also comes with 256MB ram (384 max), 30 GB harddrive, 1024x600 TFT display, SoundBlaster Pro compatable audio, V90 56kbps fax/modem, 10/100 ethernet, USBx2, IEEE1394 (ilink/firewire), cardbus type 2 PCMCIA, and SD memory slot. You can get the specifications, which are in Japanese; you can use Alta Vista to translate it. A number of stores in Tokyo are selling it for (JPY)209,800. It would be interesting to hear what type of opensource Unix (NetBSD, Linux, etc.) and X-windows driver support exists for it. Although some may find the keyboard and screen too small, many of us find it quite useable, especially when compared to a PDA."

mikenetaim asks: "Numerous people have started projects aimed at emulating the PPC based Macintosh. Those that run on machines with a PPC tend to succeed (MacOnLinux, Sheepshaver, iFusion), and every single one which attempted to emulate the CPU failed. Everyone admits that an emulated CPU will run slowly, but no one has ever released a working PPC emulator at any speed (except for an incomplete one, whose name escapes me, that was released a long time ago to statically translate AIX binaries). There are a ton of 68k emulation code floating around the 'net, and a PPC emulator should be easier to produce (due to fixed instruction length, branch predication, opcodes that dictate if CCR flags must be generated, etc). Most of the authors just claim their project was harder than they expected before disappearing. Why do all these projects fail? Can anyone point me to any information or code?"

webjam writes: "JXTA for JXME shows a practical use of Sun's JavaTM 2 Platform Micro Edition. "Project JXTA is short for Juxtapose. It is in recognition that peer to peer is juxtapose to client server or Web based computing." The purpose of project JXTA for J2ME is to provide JXTA functionality to java enabled cell-phones and handhelds. We will soon see applications released based on these projects and technologies. Those who understand and can efficiently develop applications using these tools will no doubt have a prosperous future. Even with a limited knowledge of programming, working applications can be created using the APIs provided. Check out the Software requirements and build instructions. Once running it will provide application developers with the emulation environment; documentation and examples needed to develop Java technology applications targeted at CLDC/MIDP compliant mobile phones and entry level PDAs. Also, check out some of the main JXTA projects and applications developed so far..... Oh, I almost forgot, for sending instant messaging from your mobile toys, I would suggest you go ahead and spring for that teeny external keyboard :-) Alphanumeric just doesn't cut it."

jx100 writes: "I've been following the Mac emulation community for awhile, and, apparently, Mac PPC emulators are about to be unveiled for the PC. Emaculation.com says that Microcode Solutions and Emulators Inc. are planning on showing their emulators at MacWorld Tokyo 2002."

EvilDonut writes: "Following the roar of protests following the shut down of the BnetD-project, Blizzard has posted a Battle.net emulation FAQ, citing their reasons to to search out and close any project that allows people to play Blizzard games online without using Battle.net. Their main arguments are software piracy and the ability to control and expire the WarCraft III beta." There's also a brief note from the Bnetd people, included below.

raist_online asks: "My boss has just received a new iBook and asked me to sort out a multi-OS install. I'll admit to being a PC hardware person primarily. If it was a PC-based machine I'd install Linux as a base system, then put Executor on for Mac emulation and VMWare for other PC hosted OS's, but I'm sure there must be a better way to handle the Linux / Mac thing with OSX around (I'm just not sure what that is) and I know that VMWare only runs on PC processors (Intel and Athlons). So, what do you suggest? Yellow Dog or Mandrake Linux? OSX or Executor or what? Is there a virtual PC I can use? For our research, the more operating systems we can get onto this one machine, the better!"

Jobe_br asks: "I've recently come across a need for a way of connecting to a SCO Unix box with full SCO-ANSI emulation (so that I can send F1-F12 commands and ASCII line art appears as lines, not strange foreign letters). After checking out the Terminal-HOWTO at linuxdoc.org I came away with no clearer understanding of what I need to do. I can pretty much pick any 'ole terminal emulator for win32 and get what I need, but no matter what I do to fiddle with my xterms/eterms/vts I can't get things to go. Is this not facilitated under Linux?"

HomeBrewR writes: "Behold the power of MacOS X... Windows XP? Who cares! You guys arent going to believe what I was able to do in one bored day at work. http://www.mystaticip.com/homebrew shows my effort. I took OS X 10.1, installed fink with rootless Xfree86 with IceWM running BasiliskII [running MacOS 7.6]. OS X is also running ircle and VPC test drive running Windows XP. Simply amazing. The speed on this iBook 466SE of all the apps left much to be desired. This was a feasibility test. The speed of either one of the emulators running by themselves was decent if you turned off all the eye candy in Windows XP. I'm REALLY interested in getting BasiliskII up and running to be able to play all those games that OS 8 broke...stuff like Ancient Art of War and Vette. Check it out and have fun duplicating the effort HomeBrewR" The question I'm sure you're asking now is Why stop there?

Gunder123 writes: "A new (open source in the past, but not anymore) operating system, SkyOS, in its latest version can run Linux binaries unmodified, without the need of a recompilation, enriching its own application base this way. Their Linux emulation layer lies inside the SkyOS kernel, I wonder if there are any GPL violations going on here. Their future plans involve also an emulation layer for Windows applications, pretty much what ReactOS tries to do for the last few years for the WindowsNT model."