>> A hundred maybe, but a million?
>
> Last time I checked, the IA32 instruction set is *very* complex. I doubt 
> it's got any simpler since then...

But still, presumably you write your emulator in such a way that the most 
common instructions (that usually take 1 or just a few clock cycles) are 
emulated as fast as possible.

I would guess emulation is a prime candidate to be written in assembler, 
where you can just have a huge branch table for each instruction type, then 
jump the real CPU program counter into that table based on the op-code.  In 
that way, I would imagine you can get away with even a factor of 10 
slow-down for the common instructions.

Post a reply to this message