G2 Emulator

[muteki]

(09-16-2022 07:13 PM)Jean-Baptiste Boric Wrote:  

(09-15-2022 06:12 PM)muteki Wrote:  I'd suggest to base the effort on Unicorn. It tries to provide a stable "scripting" API for QEMU which could slow down code rot especially after the project went into maintenance mode, and it also has bindings for other easier-to-develop-for languages (namely rust in this case).

That depends on what the end goal is. If I were to eventually upstream the machine emulator code to QEMU then there aren't a lot of options but to work within QEMU's codebase.

I've never worked with Unicorn, but I do understand the appeal given QEMU's... smelly innards. I've managed to figure out enough of it on my own to hack together machine emulators and peripherals without making a mess in the process, but that was not for the faint of heart. That being said, QEMU does offer a fully-featured machine emulation framework, whereas Unicorn does not. I'd expect Unicorn to be much easier to start with, but to also require a lot more work to get a fully-featured emulator out of it.

Speaking of code rot: The G1 emulator on GitHub is already not buildable and nothing is upstreamed. That's exactly why I would stay away from downstreaming a huge project like QEMU or GCC unless I'm sure that I will constantly working on it. Once the plug is pulled it's dead after a few years or even months.