How to Write An Emulator

If you want to emulate a machine you can write a VHDL description of the hardware and then compile that into a C program which runs on another machine. This is how Angelo Papenhoff does it. Compare this with the top-down semantics and formal proof approach of CakeML: David MacQueen on his Ideas for Successor ML. I wonder if there is a way to combine these approaches in a kind of analytic/synthetic dialectic?  See also How Could One Unify CMU and MIT and Nada Amin - Metacircular Interpretation ad infinitum.

Levy's book Hackers was an inspiration for these projects.

 

See https://pidp.net.

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Here's some of the story behind these emulators:


1:14:17 New lunar lander game written three months earlier. 

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Mike Stewart made a gate-level emulator of the Apollo Guidance Computer and a few weeks ago he did an industrial archaeology project to find out what happened to one of the core rope memory modules:

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See the full Apollo Guidance Computer restoration playlist here and the Apollo S-Band Comms playlist here.  

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