Very interesting.
I wonder if sbemu/other quasi-emulators might find this useful...?

Lets hope it will be for someone. multi core use in Dos would be great feature...

Quick, buy up all the slot 1, 370 and socket A dual boards before someone figures out how to do Voodoo emulation on 2nd CPU. 🤣

I'm running an i3 with reasonable success in w98.
At 3ghz I probably don't really need to offload the sound, but I wouldn't say no to a virtual voodoo if it has the grunt.
That said, if picogus could magically become firmware of sorts that talks IRQs, io etc and to the hda, it might drag the "to new" curve up a few years.

I think RayeR talked about something similar somewhere. Or maybe i'm going crazy.

Edit: Comments say original by "bloodwych" They cannot be talking about bloodwych for DOS, right?
Edit 2: It's Bloodwych from the EAB (English Amiga Board)

Interesting stuff nonetheless. a worker core is running with no interrupt handlers, no page tables, no memory protection, and no OS. That's about as close to bare metal as you can get, meanwhile the other core is still running DOS. Fascinating.

Using additional cores (though cache contention on multicore instead of oldschool SMP might crop up) on anachronistic boxes (thin clients, and laptops running DOS and vsbhda/sbemu, etc) might be a good application here.

@dartfrog nice analysis! This reads quite cool. reminds me to "everybody thought its impossible, till somebody came along an simly created it."

dartfrog wrote on Yesterday, 19:17:

Interesting stuff nonetheless. a worker core is running with no interrupt handlers, no page tables, no memory protection, and no OS. That's about as close to bare metal as you can get, meanwhile the other core is still running DOS. Fascinating.

So...
If we imagine it as a blind, deaf, dumb math machine not that different to punch cards...
How does it get fed? (Where do you load the punch cards?)
Can you assign it a block of memory to put a "main" loop (load all the punch cards)?
Where does it put its work? (Where's the printer?)

Is my thought above about using it as a coprocessor for emulationy things eg picogus plausible?

I wish people commented code better. Idiots like me have nfi what's going on.

I assume this is pointers directly to memory addresses to update...?
2x 8bit integers and a 32bit int.
state = (volatile uint8_t *)0x90100;
alive = (volatile uint8_t *)0x90101;
cpuHz = *((volatile uint32_t *)0x90104); // bogomips

meanwhile i send it and phoned to a study collegue. he explained the 2cores thingy like a shared appartement. if theres only 2 people, than youll always know who is and was in charge for the house keeping. you only need plans if theres more dudes (or bras) in there. but of course you share separate rooms and such you send text messages between each other.
only if you have food to share, you have to bring it over. but remember your collegue has no teeth so he cant eat many tasty things u like! I love such analogies