VCF PNW 2018: Pictures!

[Peter Corlett]

On Mon, Feb 19, 2018 at 06:36:13PM -0600, Adrian Stoness via cctalk wrote:
> whats invovled in makin an emulator?
> i have a chunk of stuff for the phillips p1000

That depends on how accurate you want the emulation to be.

A programmer of modest ability should be able to knock up a simple
switch()-based step-by-step CPU emulation in a few hours. This is analogous to
a simple microcoded CPU and the performance will suck.

Making it *cycle-accurate* involves deep understanding of the emulated CPU's
internal architecture. If part of the platform requires cycle-accurate timing
for bit-banging some hardware device, you're going to need this.

Making it *fast* also involves being an expert in compiler backends for the
target architecture, because this requires decompiling and then recompiling the
code on the fly.

... and that's the easy bit. Now you get to emulate the hardware.