Invisible wrote:
> Until yesterday, I had always assumed that any kind of emulation or
> virtualisation solution would be roughly 1,000,000x slower than native
> execution, so it's not something I've ever been interested in. Hence
> it's something I know almost nothing about. However, since it appears
> that you can actually run real software at almost native speeds,
> suddenly it becomes far more interesting... ;-)

There is an emulator for PowerPC processors called PearPC.

It has two modes. One is an actual interpreter. Runs anywhere; it's quite
portable C code. 500x slower than native.

The other mode is only for x86 hosts. Translates PowerPC instructions into
x86 instructions on-demand, and caches the translations. 15x slower than
native.

I have also seen an IBM PC emulator written in Java. It was pretty fun to
see Linux and DOS boot inside a browser (even though the RAM usage was
insanely high). But even Lemmings under DOS ran at slow motion in that
emulator...

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