Holy cow, a 386 with VGA and SoundBlaster on a $1 MCU?
I recall VICE emulating the Brotkasten on 386 PCs some thirty years ago, later UAE doing it for Amiga. How long til my currently running system (anno 2016) is being emulated?
Holy cow, a 386 with VGA and SoundBlaster on a $1 MCU?
I recall VICE emulating the Brotkasten on 386 PCs some thirty years ago, later UAE doing it for Amiga. How long til my currently running system (anno 2016) is being emulated?
Maybe never with current technology? Looking just at the CPU and assuming you need comfortable IPC overhead for emulation, the 386 was from early in the Dennard scaling era and modern CPUs are 1000x or more faster single-thread. Since maybe 2012 that hasn't moved anywhere near that, certainly less than 10x.
Figure 6 in "A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture" is a good representation of that effect: https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3282307.
For the GPU things are potentially looking better! But since distributed shaders/kernels are higher-level compiled for your specific device, there's less of a need for emulation.
Either "already" or "not any time soon", depending on how you count.
Already - because you have VMs and backwards compatibility. As long as you keep using Intel x86_64, your apps would run, no emulation needed. Or you can use the VM.
Not any time soon - because the computers are not speeding up that fast. 10 year old computers are still being used today, and even the latest CPUs are not orders of magnitude faster. So for a full-system emulation, the most well-known ones is x86 VM's on Apple Silicon, and according to reports, full-system mode is still not close to regular PCs.
16-bit x86 code dependent on interacting with real hardware under precise timing doesn't always work well in a VM.
> 16-bit x86 code dependent on interacting with real hardware under precise timing doesn't always work well in a VM.
This reminds me of the 8088mph demo - 1k colours in CGA, and a bunch of other impressive stuff.
8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators (oldskool.org)
319 points by drv on April 8, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 99 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9338944
https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-al...
true, but the question was about "my currently running system (anno 2016)" - which means intel core most likely. And at that generation, there requirements for precise timing is extremely rare, it's mostly PCI/PCIe devices and they can be shared with VMs just fine.
>Holy cow, a 386 with VGA and SoundBlaster on a $1 MCU?
The right software -- really does add value(!) to (let's-just-say-it-isn't-an-nVidia-GB300!) hardware, now doesn't it? :-)
I don't know about anyone else -- but I'm sold!
The value proposition on this one is truly awesome!