Am 21.12.2010 um 03:47 schrieb John Williams:
This is a really interesting discussion which goes to the heart of QEMU's identity.
Right...
A contemporary emulation and virtualisation platform (modern embedded, KVM etc)? An emulation platform for retro-computing nostalgia? How about as a unifying platform for MAME?
The way I see it, QEMU has shifted from the "packaged" desktop emulation to a much more diversified emulation platform, say, a library of qdev devices of which boards are pieced together. So if someone contributes one particular machine, its devices can likely find reuse for other boards and archs as well. In the PReP case, for example the 40p's i82378.
In the case at hands, I was seeing possible reuse for target-z80/ bits beyond nostalgia.
QEMU can be a backend for many use cases as long as cycle-accurateness is not needed. The (lack of) frontends are its weekness though, which I guess makes it unsuitable for gaming. Game emulators on the contrary often oppose attempts to add more serious emulation features (e.g., LPT printing support in DOSBox).
Cheers, Andreas
