Further PERQ Emulator progress (and a download!)

[Joshua Alexander Dersch]

Ray Arachelian writes: 


> 
> Of course the real problem is that since it was written in .NET it will 
> have to be a whole rewrite into C or C++ or something that either Qt or wx 
> supports.  I'd opt for pure C for all the low level stuff and C++ or 
> something else for the UI.  mono and .Net are nice and all, but I'd say 
> they're far from an ideal platform for an emulator.  Yes, I know, there's 
> a PC emulator written in JAVA, today's machines are capable of running an 
> emulator inside a virtual machine (ok, with JIT compilation), but why put 
> up with all the overhead? 
> 

I like C# (and 'managed' code in general) because it allows me to focus on 
the problem rather than the tool.  I can fool around with ideas and write 
fairly clean code in C# very quickly and I don't have to worry about mundane 
details like memory management, bad pointers, and stupid "shoot yourself in 
the foot" mistakes (I consider myself a good programmer, but that doesn't 
mean I don't appreciate a language that helps me write better code).  I 
wrote most of the code for this emulator in my spare time over just 5 weeks 
at the end of 2006, it just got moved to the back burner until recently. 

Yes, it's probably not as fast as something written in pure C but I'm not 
too concerned about that.  The portability issue is unfortunate, but I'm 
hoping that Mono will make it possible to run it on non-Windows platforms.  
(It looks like Mono now has some manner of Winforms support, so it may not 
even be necessary to make any changes at all...) 

I wouldn't mind rewriting it in C after getting everything worked out in C#, 
to make it more palatable for other OSes.  But it helps me immensely to 
write it in a high-level OOP language first to keep my code (and my mind) in 
order.  (I don't consider C++ to be "high level" :)). 

I've tried to keep the emulation code fairly abstracted from the UI (there's 
really only a window and keyboard/mouse input, so it should be trivial to 
port to a different system if need be.) 

> Anyway, I'm very happy to see a PERQ emulator, in any form. 
> 

Thanks.  It's been a fun process and I hope that someone somewhere gets some 
use out of it once I get it working better :). 

Josh