Haiku-native BeBox emulator boots original BeOS ROMs and rare Hobbit prototypes

An emulator called BeBox, published on GitHub under the account johnrash and surfaced on Hacker News, recreates Be Inc.'s dual-processor machine as a native Haiku application. According to the project's documentation, it runs both production PowerPC models from their original boot ROMs and boots BeOS for PowerPC from Developer Release 6 through R5.0.3. It also reaches further back than the shipping hardware: it emulates the Hobbit prototypes Be built before the PowerPC machines, running the company's 1993-94 system from the disks that survive with a few original units.

What the emulator reproduces

The BeBox shipped in two variants: the Dual603-66, with two PowerPC 603 processors at 66 MHz, and the Dual603e-133, with two 603e chips at 133 MHz, both on a 33 MHz bus. The emulator implements both CPUs in an interpreter that includes the 603's software-managed TLB, along with the MPC105 bridge chip and the BeBox's interrupt and CPU control registers.

The boot ROM lives in writable flash — BeOS's own ROM updater works inside the emulator — and NVRAM and a real-time clock are emulated too. Video is handled by a Number Nine #9 GXE64 card (an S3 Vision864 with an AT&T RAMDAC) as the default, or a Cirrus Logic CL-GD5434, covering resolutions from 640x480 to 1280x1024 at 8 or 32 bits per pixel. Sound plays through an emulated Crystal CS4231A codec via Haiku's media kit.

Peripheral support is broad: an AT keyboard, a PS/2 mouse, four game ports, NCR 53C810 SCSI for disks and CD-ROMs on IDs 0-6, plus IDE and floppy storage. Four serial ports can be routed to a console window, a TCP server or client, a host serial port or a log file. An NE2000-compatible ISA network card sits behind NAT through libslirp, letting the guest reach the host and the Internet, with host ports forwardable to it. A Haiku folder can be shared with BeOS as a read-write SCSI disk, with changes written back when the guest shuts down. The parallel port, GeekPort, MIDI and infrared ports are not emulated yet.

The machine's signature front panel appears as well: two columns of "blinkenlights," each sixteen light-pipe segments — a fifteen-LED CPU load bar above a power LED on the left and a disk LED on the right, in the original lime and amber.

The Hobbit prototypes

Before the PowerPC BeBox, Be built its machine around two AT&T 92010 "Hobbit" processors at 25 MHz, three AT&T DSP3210 signal processors and the BeBus. A few prototypes survive with their disks, running Be's 1993-94 system: a window server, a console, and the Browser with its dock.

Emulating these meant writing a Hobbit interpreter from AT&T's programmer's reference, covering the processor's stack cache, MMU, timers and event sequences. The board's I/O and interrupt registers, floppy DMA, PC-compatible I/O chips and an NCR 53C94 SCSI controller are implemented, along with a Trident VGA card carrying an XGA-style graphics engine, offering 640x480 or 800x600 at 256 colors. The three DSPs and their attached sound, telephone and modem hardware, the Ethernet card, the joystick controller and the parallel port are not emulated; the system still starts, though its sound server reports an error.

Because no boot ROM from these machines survives, the emulator performs the boot ROM's job itself, loading the kernel from the boot volume. Users pick 4, 8, 16, 20 or 32 MB of memory — the sizes the kernel knows — and can install the November 1994 system from original floppies. The documentation notes quirks faithful to real hardware, such as the console appearing instead of the Browser because of a case difference in a file path, which the actual machines also exhibited.

What you need to supply

The ROMs are not distributed with the emulator: users must provide bootnub.rom (16 KB) and bootmain.rom (Be Boot ROM 1.1d7) from a real BeBox, plus BeOS for PowerPC CD images. Later BFS-based releases need a newer boot ROM, which the Preview Release 2, R3 and R4.5 CDs carry as a file the emulator can extract automatically. Since the Hobbit system writes to its disks, the project recommends protecting images with QCOW2 overlays, and machine configurations are managed as switchable named profiles because each release prefers its own setup.

Why it matters

The BeBox is the machine BeOS was born on, and Haiku is that operating system's open-source descendant — so a Haiku-native emulator lets BeOS's successor boot the very hardware the system originally ran on. The Hobbit support is also a preservation effort: with only a few prototypes remaining and no boot ROMs in existence, an interpreter written from a programmer's manual may be the only way future users can experience Be's earliest system. For OS enthusiasts and retro-computing fans, the project turns a genuinely rare machine into something anyone with the right ROMs and disk images can power on.