recursive emulation

[Toby Thain]

On 2017-01-24 2:46 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. wrote:
> Chuck Guzis asked on Mon, 23 Jan 2017 22:00:15 -0800
>> Is there a "recursive" emulator setup wherein one machine emulates
>> another one...where the final emulation is for the original hardware?
>
> 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.

Was this a JIT emulator (like Apple's later versions of 68K emulation), 
or a simple interpreter?

--Toby


 > 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
>