Emulation is a fascinating area of software engineering, being able to bring to life a 30+ year old arcade machine on a modern computer is an incredib

Bringing emulation into the 21st century - David Tyler's Blog

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2021-05-24 20:30:06

Emulation is a fascinating area of software engineering, being able to bring to life a 30+ year old arcade machine on a modern computer is an incredibly satisfying accomplishment. Unfortunately I’ve become increasingly disillusioned with the lack of ambition shown by those in the emulation community. Whilst the rest of world moves onto cloud first, massively distributed architectures, emulation is still stuck firmly in the 20th century writing single threaded C++ of all things.

This culminated in the implementation of an 8080 microprocessor utilising a modern, containerised, microservices based architecture running on kubernetes with frontends for a CP/M test harness and a full implementation of the original Space Invaders arcade machine.

The full project can be found as a github organisation https://github.com/21st-century-emulation which contains ~60 individual repositories each implementing an individual microservice or providing the infrastructure. This article goes into details on the technical architecture and issues I ran into with the project.