Writing emulators [Was: Re: VCF PNW 2018: Pictures!]

[Eric Christopherson]

On Tue, Feb 20, 2018 at 5:30 PM, dwight via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:

> In order to connect to the outside world, you need a way to queue event
> based on cycle counts, execution of particular address or particular
> instructions. This allows you to connect to the outside world. Other than
> that it is just looking up instructions in an instruction table.
>
> Dwight
>

What I've always wondered about was how the heck cycle-accurate emulation
is done. In the past I've always felt overwhelmed looking in the sources of
emulators like that to see how they do it, but maybe it's time I tried
again.

Another more-complex thing done by some emulators is compiling, on the fly,
a series of emulated machine instructions into native host machine code, to
boost performance. That's also what the Java virtual machine does.


>
>
> ________________________________
> From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> on behalf of Pontus Pihlgren
> via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, February 20, 2018 11:22:32 AM
> To: Adrian Stoness; General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
> Subject: Writing emulators [Was: Re: VCF PNW 2018: Pictures!]
>
> 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
>
> I would say it depends a lot on how complex your target machine is. But
> in essense you will have to write code for each device you wish to
> emulate mapping their functionality over to your host machine, the one
> running the emulator.
>
> As a minimum you will write code for the CPU and some sort of output
> device, such as a serial console. For some machines you might need
> images of ROM code in order to be fully compatible with existing
> software.
>
> I wrote a PDP-8 emulator for fun. The basic CPU and serial was done in a
> few hours. I then hardcoded the paper tape loader in memory and allowed
> input to be read from an image file.
>
> Adding extended memory support and running conformance tests has taken
> the bulk of the time.
>
> /P
>



-- 
        Eric Christopherson