chips VS sokol

Because it's a software implementation in Verilog which is much closer to a software emulator and has nothing to do with the original Z80 "transistor structure".

For instance here's the LD A,(DE) "payload":

https://github.com/rejunity/z80-open-silicon/blob/974c7711b2...

And here's the equivalent in my software emulator:

https://github.com/floooh/chips/blob/bd1ecff58337574bb46eba5...

What's interesting though is that the Verilog implementation doesn't seem to update the internal WZ register, even though there are references to WZ in other places.

But in the end, if it looks and feels like a Z80 from the outside (e.g. the right pins are active at the right time) the internal implementation doesn't matter all that much.

Author here, interesting to see this posted since it's more like a reference manual for Z80 instructions with 'unusual' timings. The followup blog post about the cycle-stepped Z80 emulator is probably more interesting:

https://floooh.github.io/2021/12/17/cycle-stepped-z80.html

One important note: at the start of the post I'm speculating about why I was seeing some minor differences to a 'real' Z80, it turned out that this speculation was wrong and instead the differences were caused by 'incomplete' netlist simulation code which worked fine for the 6502 but required some tweaks for the Z80, see the comments of this GH issue for details: https://github.com/floooh/v6502r/issues/2.

As far as I'm aware the netlist simulation now behaves correctly like a Zilog Z80 (but note that reverse engineered Z80 clones like the East German U880 are known to have slightly different undocumented behaviour), and the Z80 emulator in https://github.com/floooh/chips is tested against the netlist simulation for correct behaviour and timing.

I simply don't see that there's a big enough difference between traditional garbage collection, refcounting and manual memory management. Each of those can already be implemented in pure WASM, just more or less awkwardly.

As for "just another ISA", there have been CPUs which had separate call- and data-stacks, with the call-stack living on the CPU and not accessible as regular data. In that sense WASM isn't much different then those esoteric CPUs.

And even though WASM might not allow free jumps, I yet have to see a noticeable performance difference between WASM and native for this type of "worst case code":

https://github.com/floooh/chips/blob/f5b6684ff6e899429544b21...

Oh my, the 6502 emulation [1] has fewer lines of assembly code than my (code-generated) implementation has lines of C code [2] :D

Very nice use of a macro assembler though [3], makes the code feel very high level.

To my defense, the generated code has a lot of redundancies (such as assert(false) which were meant to catch any 'stray cycles' but which are removed in release mode.

[1] https://github.com/zajo/appler/blob/develop/src/65C02.ASM

[2] https://github.com/floooh/chips/blob/master/chips/m6502.h

[3] https://github.com/zajo/appler/blob/52aaa0f768cdf303438cd2c7...

I don't know if it's the best code I've ever read but this emulation library [0] of 8 bits computers is pretty well written, documented and designed: https://github.com/floooh/chips.

It's a good way to document old hardware with emulation code.

Looks like here's the source code of the emulators:

8-bit chip and system emulators in standalone C headers - https://github.com/floooh/chips

There's a project on GitHub of similar nature -- it has include-able .h files emulating 8-bit computer chips on the pin level, and bus state is also held in a 64-bit value: https://github.com/floooh/chips/blob/master/chips/m6502.h

I wrote also a library of components for some complex chips (like 6502 simulation using https://github.com/floooh/chips)

I'm using Dear ImGui for my cross-platform code (which includes running in browsers):

- https://floooh.github.io/visual6502remix/

- https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit/c64-ui.html

- (start these samples by clicking on the little "UI" icon) https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/

Platform abstraction is handled through the sokol headers: https://github.com/floooh/sokol

I wonder if using your library (https://github.com/floooh/sokol) instead of OpenGL will alleviate some of these issues for newcomers! There's already a sokol port of the learnopengl.com code (https://github.com/GeertArien/learnopengl-examples), so it shouldn't be too hard to match between the tutorial articles and these.

If you're looking for something like this, Sokol is a much simpler alternative:

https://github.com/floooh/sokol

It doesn't support vulkan though, but if that's important to you you're probably much better off just using vulkan directly since it's supported on all the major platforms.

All I can do is give you a couple of Github ticket links where users of my libraries stumbled over the issue (and with different symptoms):

- https://github.com/floooh/sokol/issues/376

- https://github.com/floooh/sokol/issues/404

- https://github.com/floooh/cimgui-sokol-starterkit/issues/6

We then added a dummy call to a no-op pthread function, so that users can better figure out that they need to use -pthread because now they get a linker error instead of a runtime crash or hang. This has since reduced the 'support overhead' quite a bit:

- https://github.com/floooh/sokol/pull/456

My stuff for instance:

https://github.com/floooh/sokol

...inspired by:

https://github.com/nothings/stb

But it's not so much about the build system, but requiring a separate C/C++ compiler toolchain (Rust needs this, Zig currently does not - unless the proposal is implemented).

I have never personally used it but I'm pretty sure sokol has an audio library that might be what you are after.

And I asked floooh for similar thoughts on making a website with sokol here: https://github.com/floooh/sokol/issues/825

It's not Rust and TS, instead C and JS, but Emscripten has a very nice way of integrating C/C++ and JS (you can just embed snippets of Javascript inside C/C++ source files), e.g. starting at this line, there's a couple of embedded Javascript functions which can be called like C functions directly from the "C side":

https://github.com/floooh/sokol/blob/4535a3b4be59eb912e77e04...