101–110 of 171 posts
How bad is it that Windows 98, running in a ^%%^@#!ing emulator, in my browser no less, runs better than the latest versions of Android OR iOS?
Perhaps because it doesn't run well for everyone?
But is the A20 gate being properly emulated? :) I know a verification engineer who left AMD because he was tired of dealing with the ancient testbench which checked the ancient hardware. The browser should run in the hypervisor and provide a real hardware virtual machine. Provide both ARM and x86, one is emulated and one is real.
It's not. I haven't come across any software that relied on it.
Any tips on how I can reliably trigger a BSOD? For old time's sake.
I found this very ironic.. It died while trying to die.
This is such a great demonstration of both how fast JS engines have become in the browser, and how much less efficient native software has become overall. Running on top of an x86 emulator in JavaScript , it's still faster to pop open a file browser and click around than it is on some modern smartphones.
It's not that "native software" has become less efficient, but rather that it is slowly disappearing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Learning about CPU internals was a huge part of your first year in CS? Where did you go to school? At my school and every other school I'm remotely familiar with, the knowledge needed to emulate a CPU would be covered in upper division computer engineering courses, and not covered by CS undergrads at all, certainly not in their first year.
Back in 2007, my first semester in a technical CS school had plenty of assembly, binary, MMU emulation, OSI / TCP/IP, boolean math and so on. I know this is mostly gone at this point, but it should not. The fundamentals are essentials. I often meet people who are totally clueless how a computer work and have CS degrees. "How can you do C, it is so old? By now, we must have invented faster languages. Computers changed…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
University courses? I'm pretty sure CPUs were a huge part of my first year of CS.
Learning about CPU internals was a huge part of your first year in CS? Where did you go to school? At my school and every other school I'm remotely familiar with, the knowledge needed to emulate a CPU would be covered in upper division computer engineering courses, and not covered by CS undergrads at all, certainly not in their first year.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I always feel the same when I see similar things. How do you even start?
Personally, I had some courses on computer architectures, and those covered the theory of how CPUs are constructed, how they run programs, etc. I decided to write an NES emulator. So: - Find Wikipedia articles, and learn that it used a variant of the MOS Technology 6502, which was used in a lot of computers in the 80s. - Find some digitized assembly programming manuals from the time (I think the one I used was distri…
I don't understand why a basic understanding of CPU architectures isn't a CS fundamental everywhere.
Even if you have no interest in emulating a CPU or an OS, you really do need to know what registers are, how caches work, what interrupts do, and how basic IO happens.
At the very least it's a practical demonstration of one particular kind of VM, and - if you want to - you can generalise from that to VMs of your own design.
For web apps, not understanding these things can get expensive. Cycles, even cloud cycles, aren't free, and if you take zero interest in optimisation and efficiency you're literally throwing money away.
How bad is it that Windows 98, running in a ^%%^@#!ing emulator, in my browser no less, runs better than the latest versions of Android OR iOS?
I'm on a beefy 12-core 'nix box with 64 GB of RAM, and this emulator is extremely sluggish for me. Perhaps because it doesn't run well for everyone?