Possibly writing an emulator... of sorts — #19

Post #19 by porter

Source Forum	68kMLA
Category	Development
Post Date	Tue, 23 Dec 2008 - 18:35
Original URL	https://68kmla.org/bb/threads/possibly-writing-an-emulator-of-sorts.15940/

Post

What you're proposing is essentially the same as building a scratch-built, homebrew computer, like those linked off the 6502 thread, and a homebrew OS to run on it. Except that you want to do it in software, rather than hardware.

except

This sounds interesting and all but I don't find "systems programming" very interesting

If you build it yourself to your own design you need to do the systems programming. When a CPU starts, even an emulated CPU, it has to run some code, because that's what CPUs do. Where is that code going to come from.

I'm more of a GUI designer

There is a huge difference between a GUI designer and a graphics programmer. Using QuickDraw to get coloured pixels on the screen is one level, bit twiddling in memory is another, I will leave you to guess which is simpler and more productive for the programmer.