"Andy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote > prove me wrong. I have decided that I would like to try and write > an > emulator, I'm going to start out with a couple of simpler systems > like > the Chip 8 and maybe a well documented arcade game but I would like > to > do an NES emulator eventually.
That's pretty challenging but not that difficult techically for the CPU. The hardest bit is simulating the I/O subsystem and all the quirks of the monitor/OS. > Is Python anywhere near fast enough to do this and have > it be playable? Probably. Modern PCs are arpund 4000 times faster than the older machines and you can do a lot of emulation in 4000 instructions! And because you are doing it in a high level language a single machine instruction should only translate to a few Python commands which hopefully translate to a few hundred CPU commands. > I hope so because I really don't like C/C++. C is simple enough and quite good for this kind of thing because its so close to the hardware. C++ doesn't add much for this kind of job in my experience. Its basically a big jump table (aka dictionary) with a whole lot of very small functions. But python makes it easier to experiment because the jump table is almost fgree and the functions should be only a handful of lines each. The most technically challenging bit is likely to be reading the programs from the other machine - extracting and decoding the binary data format. If you have that documented then its a fairly straightforward if tedious job! -- Alan Gauld Author of the Learn to Program web site http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
