CPU Emulation and locking to a specific clock speed

Question

If you had read my other question, you\'ll know I\'ve spent this weekend putting together a 6502 CPU emulator as a programming exercise.

The CPU emulator is mostly c

Answer 1

Take a look at the original quicktime documentation for inspiration.

It was written a long time ago, when displaying video meant just swapping still frames at high enough speed, but the Apple guys decided they needed a full time-management framework. The design at first looks overengineered, but it let them deal with widely different speed requirements and keep them tightly synchronized.

you're fortunate that 6502 has deterministic time behaviour, the exact time each instruction takes is well documented; but it's not constant. some instructions take 2 cycles, other 3. Just like frames in QuickTime, a video doesn't have a 'frames per second' parameter, each frame tells how long it wants to be in screen.

Since modern CPU's are so non-deterministic, and multitasking OS's can even freeze for a few miliseconds (virtual memory!), you should keep a tab if you're behind schedule, or if you can take a few microseconds nap.