I was going to reply along the same lines, but I felt it might not have convinced my audience. Back in the old days of 22Nice, we added an emulator feature that allowed a user to write his own port-mapping code and include it with each program, allowing each individual program to have its own simulated peripherals, if desired. This was no accident or a "feature for feature's sake". A customer was replacing a controller on a large piece of CNC machine tooling (they made trailers for large trucks). Communication with the machine was largely RS-232, so that was no problem with the PC, but the controller application directly manipulated a UARTs registers. We rolled an emulator overlay for the UART that functionally mapped the program's accesses to the PC's 8250-type UART. It worked right on the first try and the customer was happy for many years--and we changed not a byte of code in the original program, nor our basic product. That's the beauty of emulation--if the original box uses a bizarre interface or unobtainium chip, you can emulate it. MUCH easier than trying to do the same in hardware. Modern PCs tend to have sufficient excess horsepower that you can emulate just about any 80's era device without impacting performance. But, as I've said, I felt that I wasn't going to sway the hard-bitten hardware folks. As you pointed out, the line between hardware and software is getting very blurry indeed. Cheap, fast, microcontrollers now give a new spin to tasks that would have normally been accomplished with a pile of discrete logic and can now be done with little more than software. Cheers, Chuck