TI-59E for HP48GX, HP-48SX, HP-49G and HP-49G+/50G

[HrastProgrammer]

(04-29-2015 05:01 PM)Tinue Wrote:  Do you expect the emulator to be faster or slower than the real TI 59? I have never written an emulator, so this might be utter nonsense, but: Couldn't you virtualize the clock, and run the TI59E at exactly 100% of the real TI 59 speed?

I expect it to be faster, especially on HP-49G+ and HP-50G. Unfortunately, Saturn CPU doesn't have enough power for "cycle counting" so I doubt it would be possible to 100% match the speed of the real TI-59. There are TI-59 CPU instructions which are very complex to emulate (read: need a lot of Saturn instructions and a lot of cycles), while the others need just a few cycles. So, in order to simulate the real speed I would have to pad simpler instructions with a lot of dummy NOP instructions because all instructions on the real TI-59 CPU execute in 16 state times (the execution time is fixed). There is not much sense in implementing this on such not-too-powerful architecture like the good old Saturn. On ARM this would probably be possible.