[geeks] dosbox

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Tue, 19 Jun 2007 nate at portents.com wrote:

>> The emulator itself might make better use of the CPU's registers if
>> built 64-bit, though.
>>
>> We'll never see the death of IA32 if people continue to turn their
>> noses up that the one upwardly-compatible fix for that abortion of an
>> instruction set.
>
> Nice idea in theory, but you should pick better targets for this
> cause.
>
> Emulators sometimes have a hand-coded assembly core, or sometimes use
> dynamic instruction translation when running on a CPU core that
> supports the emulated instruction set.

Given that I've run DOSbox on a Mac, I'm pretty sure that it can be
built without an x86 assembler.  It would be interesting to benchmark
the code resulting from the "pure C" compilation path against both IA32
and amd64.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke ) "When they turn the pages of history, when these
Elgin, TX        (   days have passed long ago, will they read of us
USA               )  with sadness for the seeds that we let grow?
-                (               --Neil Peart, "A Farewell to Kings"