My original goal was to get cottonNES working on my iphone and I already accomplished that, but it turned out that a cycle accurate interpreted NES emulator on an iphone 3G runs very slow xD (about 5fps w/o frameskipping).
This slowness just won't do, so I said, "hey now i finally have a reason to code a NES dynarec!" So i went to work studying the ARM instruction set and learned the instruction encodings to code an arm code-emitter (which lets me write arm code to memory buffers so that i can later execute the generated code).
Well it turns out that the iOS on the iphone won't let me execute any code that was dynamically generated. I was using the Airplay SDK and mmap() to allocate a buffer with execution privileges, then emit arm code to it, then execute that buffer; but this ends up crashing on my jailbroken iphone 3G with firmware 3.1.2.
So at that point I was disappointed, and pissed off at fucking apple with their shit iOS. But not all hope was lost since I could still just port my emulator to Android phones which DO let me execute dynamically generated code (and therefor allow the possibility of dynarecs/JIT compilers).
The sad thing is i do not have an android phone to test my code on, but there are emulators i can use to test my code on the PC; and hopefully it will work on the real android phones.
I already had someone try my test-app on a real android phone, which tests the ability to execute dynamically generated code. And they told me the app worked on their droid, so this is good news.
If i don't get bored with the project, this should be the first nintendo emulator with a real dynarec ever AFAIK (there's one emulator i've seen claim to use dynamic recompilation, but it was really doing what i call "function caching", and not a real dynarec).
Anyways, here's a pic of the interpreter version running on one of airplay's simulators:
I didn't know about Airplay, it lokks very cool! And good job on the emulator/dynarec :)
ReplyDeleteAirplay is pretty damn cool indeed; if you want to code an app for the iphone or android OS then i recommend you try it out.
ReplyDeleteYou can use c++ with the standard library and stuff, and test your code on the airplay simulators.
Its not the best environment for low-level and platform specific stuff though; but aside from that its relatively easy to learn and setup.
I might use it for game programming in the future since its a super easy way to make an app for both the android and iOS platforms.