Shared Source Device Emulator from Microsoft

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has posted a shared source version of its device emulator (which ships with Visual Studio 2005) for download. Primarily meant for academia to experiment with and build upon, it is licensed under the Microsoft Shared Source Academic License. Since it emulates the ARM processor, it can run all modern Windows Mobile and Windows CE operating systems. Barry Bond, the architect behind the emulator (and also Rotor, one of Microsoft's previous shared source offerings) has a blog post on the release."

Article also includes information on Optimisation

[Anonymous Coward]

On the blog, he also talks about the steps he took from the v1 code to the v2 code, and some of the optimisations he used.

The information he provided is fairly indepth and can really be applied to many a cpu emulator.

Quite an informative read.

A no go for hobbyists

[BSAtHome]

According to the license, only people who are in the category: "while attending or employed by an accredited educational institution". So only students, their teachers and researchers (and accredited means not your average school). That means almost nobody, sigh,...

Re:A no go for hobbyists

[InsaneGeek]

Accredited should mean your average school or else you are going to some place that is teaching out of the back of a van. In the US alone there are over 28,800 accredited schools (at least http://www.accreditedschools.org/ [accreditedschools.org] says there are), so your nobody in actuality if we were to use an EXTREMELY low number of only averaging 100 people per school means there are almost 3 million people who would have access to it in the US alone.

Nope, usual tricks

[Anonymous Coward]

"(B)Platform Limitation- The licenses granted in sections 2(A) & 2(B) extend only to the software or derivative works that you create that run on a Microsoft Windows operating system product.Further, you may only use the software to emulate running Windows operating system products."

"(E) If you distribute the software or derivative works in source code form you may do so only under this license (i.e., you must include a complete copy of this license with your distribution), and if you distribute the software or derivative works in compiled or object code form you may only do so under a license that complies with this license."

Re:Article also includes information on Optimisati

[Anonymous Coward]

The point is not the use of hashtable but which code paths were sufficiently hot, so that a small change to them caused a high payoff. The main problem in performance optimizations of a non-trivial program is finding which code paths have potential to offer high payoffs, the actual implementation is frequently trivial algorithmic or implementation changes.