Re: [Qemu-devel] Status of the SH4 / ARM7 emulators

["Andreas Färber" <andreas.faerber@web.de>]

Hello Renato,

Am 19.11.2011 22:20, schrieb Renato Utsch:
> I am making a dreamcast emulator and I wanted to know the status
> of the sh-4 emulator, if it is stable, if it actually works, etc... And
> the same for the ARM7-TDMI emulator (if QEMU supports it, it supports?),
> because this would save months of work. QEMU sh-4 and arm emulators are
> stable enough for doing something like that?

I know little about Dreamcast, but from looking at Wikipedia [1] it
looks as if ARM7 is used only for sound. So unless you want to develop a
new sound firmware, you can treat it as a black box and focus on SH-4.

sh4-softmmu has been successfully used to boot Linux on certain boards.
What will remain is for you to add a Dreamcast machine, instantiating
the CPU and devices, and implementing those not available in QEMU today,
such as GD-ROM. For PowerVR CLX2 you might be able to share some code
with OMAP's PowerVR SGX.

> how could I use the QEMU emulation
> without opening the actual program? I mean, there is a library for using
> the emulation in another programs?

No. The way to go about your project would be to add the missing pieces
to QEMU's system emulation, mostly in hw/ directory, and to run it via
qemu-system-sh4 -M dreamcast.

You should work with Git and submit any target-sh4 fixes to this mailing
list as well as probably any new devices.
If however you intend to do any Dreamcast-specific frontend skinning,
such parts would probably be less interesting for qemu.git.

You might want to compare ZX Spectrum emulation [2], the Android SDK [3]
and iEmu [4].

Regards,

Andreas

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamcast#Hardware
[2] http://wiki.qemu.org/Features/Z80
[3] http://tools.android.com/overview
[4] http://www.iemu.org/