Friday, January 9th
I have managed to get the parser to accept raw mask information and place it into a series of lists.
I will be doing some more parsing shortly to get a seperate section with mask constants in it, and will be generating a mask check/generator shortly.
PC
IceCube is primarily a tool to define a CPU's operations in a language independant fashion, in a precise manner which removes most of the problems with different C compilers, different CPU's and so on. We're primarily designing it to be able to describe all CPU's, and be able to be converted to most other languages, as well as provide useful tools to facilitate emulation.
Our goal is to successfully create an engine to replace the current UAE engine in vMac. We are doing this to speed up vMac's emulation and compatibility, and to make the engine more compatible for our emulation needs.
Dynamic Recompilation
This is one of the features we hope to add in once things are running smoothly. Don't expect it to be added in any time soon, and don't expect it to out perform Executor. (See below, it's probably going to be linked in with Static Recompilation).
Static Recompilation
This is probably as important as Dynamic Recompilation. With static recompilation, the problems that people have pointed out that the ROM is still in 68K, these can be solved to a degree by statically recompiling the ROM into native code, then executing the native code instead of the ROM. This will probably be tough to do, so we're thinking it would be done similarly to FX!32, where they interpret the code, profile it, then statically recompile it eventually.
There's a lot of things that can be done, with a bit of time, so we'll keep people posted on how things are going on IceCube. We can't guarantee we'll be able to get it done or get all the great features into it. Currently all we're aiming for is to get a new engine written up for vMac to use, and sort out a lot of the problems people are having with UAE's one.
