This is getting into an area I only know enough to be dangerous in: What with Verilog/VHDL approximations of various ICs being produced for FPGA-based emulation of consoles, is there any mechanism by which those same hardware descriptions can be used by some sort of software host to execute these types of cores for emulation in, say, a conventional operating system?
If so, would that capability eventually render other emulation approaches obsolete or is there still a place for, say, writing a CPU, VDP/PPU, etc. core in C/C++ rather than describing it in an HDL and simply gluing those things together with a systems language? Separation of concerns implies that shunting IC/component emulation off to an HDL is the optimal choice for that sort of thing, but I'm at a loss to explain the continued proliferation of non-HDL-based emulation if that is the case.
I'm curious what other folks' takes on this sort of thing are.
If so, would that capability eventually render other emulation approaches obsolete or is there still a place for, say, writing a CPU, VDP/PPU, etc. core in C/C++ rather than describing it in an HDL and simply gluing those things together with a systems language? Separation of concerns implies that shunting IC/component emulation off to an HDL is the optimal choice for that sort of thing, but I'm at a loss to explain the continued proliferation of non-HDL-based emulation if that is the case.
I'm curious what other folks' takes on this sort of thing are.
Statistics: Posted by segaloco — Tue Jul 23, 2024 2:21 pm — Replies 2 — Views 136