[geeks] dosbox

[nate at portents.com]

> The emulator itself might make better use of the CPU's registers if
> built 64-bit, though.
>
> We'll never see the death of IA32 if people continue to turn their noses
> up that the one upwardly-compatible fix for that abortion of an
> instruction set.

Nice idea in theory, but you should pick better targets for this cause.

Emulators sometimes have a hand-coded assembly core, or sometimes use
dynamic instruction translation when running on a CPU core that supports
the emulated instruction set.  Trying to 'speed up' an emulator by
recompiling it would only work if the entire thing was written in
cross-platform 64-bit clean code, which frankly for an emulator is not
that common.  From what I have seen, most emulator authors have focussed
on getting the most compatability and performance out of their emulators
on the lowest-common denominator systems, namely 32-bit ones, and since
most every 64-bit desktop computer these days can run 32-bit code in a
64-bit environment, and the primary reason to run 64-bit is to address
more than 4GB of RAM, the systems running 64-bit operating systems are by
far and large high-end systems which do not help an emulator writer get
the best performance and compatability out of their code for what most
people run.

- Nate