Great to hear these responses! 😀
mirekluza: I fully expected to have to produce the dynamic recompiler for ARM first before being able to submit it, so no issue's there. I just wanted to see if it's something that has potential to be submitted to the CVS since I didn't want to maintain a seperate build of DOSBox. Less donations for me 😀 but better overall for DOSBox, which is what really matters.
Spearhead: Hi! Good to see familar faces. 😀
wd: Do you think I'll run into the problem of having to change much within the DOSBox sources outside of the dynamic core source? If changes have to be made, I'll make them compatible with all hosts, or in certain cases configurable depending on how DOSBox source is setup in regards to this.
risc_arm.h will be the most tedious (yet fun, if that makes sense) process for me, since I'm more familar with ARM than X86. So I'll have to study the risc_x86.h carefully but if I have any questions, it's good to know there's help here. I'm very used to source without comments (I've dealt with horrid open source code beyond people's imagination), so I'm quick to figure out what's going on in undocumented code.
For testing the ARM Dynamic core, I'd have to use an unofficial ARM port of DOSBox it seems. There's some that keep up with DOSBox and are nicer than others. I plan on testing with a Sharp Zaurus and GP2X.
Once complete it should be compatible with a large amount of ARM based handhelds including:
- PocketPC (the Gizmondo gaming handheld and most recent PocketPC's use an ARM based Intel xScale)
- Palm (some of the recent Palm's use ARM but have a restriction on certain registers)
- GP2X (a large community of people support the GP2X handheld, popular for homebrew gaming )
- Sharp Zaurus C series (really cool Linux based PDA with built in keyboard and 640x480 screen)
- Very likely a bunch more ARM based builds of DOSBox. 😀
Most the handhelds listed run DOSBox but at slightly less speed than possible to find enjoyment playing games the user's want to. So I'm hoping this dynarec will help the performance issue. 😀
Should be a fun project.
Time to get the sources from the repository and see what I'm in for. ;P