Adventures in PC Emulation

reenigne's decoding of the 8088 microcode in 2020 opened the doors for extremely accurate emulation of the 8088 CPU.

Warning: This page contains hundreds of emoji.

GlyphBlaster The GlyphBlaster in action - is that a cat in text mode??

Entering the 16-bit Era I've been adding support for the 8086 CPU to MartyPC, and looking ahead to eventual support for the 286.

My last few articles on bus sniffing the IBM 5150 have been building up to this one.

This is part 6 of a series of articles investigating various floppy copy-protection schemes seen on the IBM PC platform.

This is part 5 of a series of articles investigating various floppy copy-protection schemes seen on the IBM PC platform.

This post goes hand-in-hand with my article on Vault Corporation's Prolok copy-protection technology.

This is Part 4 of a series on PC floppy copy protection methods.

This is Part 3 of a series on PC floppy copy protection methods.

This is part 2 of a series on PC floppy copy protection methods.

Preface This is Part 1 of a series of articles investigating various PC floppy protections, as I get them working in MartyPC.

A V20 CPU, courtesy of Konstantin Lanzet (CC) The NEC V20 was a 16-bit CPU released in 1984.

In a previous article, I described a simple state machine to explain the prefetch behavior and miscellaneous observed bus delays of the Intel 8088.

In my last article, I dodged the issue of writing a custom decoder for the 5150's bus signals to use in DSView, instead just processing the exported CSV with the pandas Python library.

Writing a cycle-accurate emulator for a computer system is more than just understanding all the CPU instruction timings.

The Book8088 is an interesting little machine.

In a previous article, I revealed one of the secrets to MartyPC's accuracy, hardware validation.

Much has been written about the PC demo 8088MPH.

⚠ This post is now outdated.

My emulator has incomplete implementations of the EGA/VGA cards.

Early in development I was looking for a utility to test my crude PC speaker emulation.

My emulator has a bug.

In the emulation world, there are a few different ways to determine if your emulator is accurate.

In order to accurately emulate cycle-counted demo effects such as the Kefrens bars effect in 8088MPH, or the end credits in Area 5150, there are essentially four prerequisites: Cycle-accurate 8088 CPU emulation including processor instruction queue emulat…