recursive emulation (was: IBM 7074 and then some: "Systems we love" conference)

Chuck Guzis asked on Mon, 23 Jan 2017 22:00:15 -0800 In 1988 I designed an ARM2 based computer (my Merlin 4, which was only built in 1992 when the ARM2 was already obsolete) and wondered if it could emulate a PC fast enough to be usable. I had written an ARM assembler and a friend did an ARM emulator running in QNX on the PC, so we wrote an 8088 emulator in ARM assembly. We then ran some simple 8088 programs on the PC emulator running on the ARM emulator running on the PC. This allowed us to figure out that an 8 MHz ARM2 would be able to run PC programs at nearly the speed of a 4.77 MHz 8088. Though there were much faster PCs at the time, the original configuration was still being sold and was popular enough that this would have been considered usable. It was not enough to convince my partner, however, which is why the machine was not finished in 1988. -- Jecel