Roadmap for Dioscuri
Date creation : 29 January 2007
Date last update : 17 September 2007
Organisations : National Library of the Netherlands, Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands
Roadmap
- Finalise Intel 8086 CPU (Windows 3.0 capable)
- Mouse support
- CD-ROM support
- Sound support
- Store/restore state functionality
- Introduce shortcut keys to menu items
- Screen data extraction support (VGA dump/text dump)
- Command-line interface (automated invocation)
- Metadata for each module based on metadata schema
- Improve exception handling model (take care of CPU exceptions)
- Upgrade to Intel 80286, 16-bit, protected mode (Windows 3.x capable)
- Floating point unit (FPU)
- Redesign CPU architecture to follow prefetch, execution, flag settings workflow
- Upgrade to Intel 80386, 32-bit, paging, FPU (Windows 95 capable)
- Improve GUI and use a better status update mechanism between GUI and modules
- Module library and software registry
- Network support
- Remote emulator control
- Wrapping emulator in service-based architecture
Considerations
- Performance improvements: + run profiler on emulator
- Refactoring: + module structure
- Testing: + create Unit tests, especially for CPU instructions
+ implement CPU caching mechanism to avoid extensive recalculation of memory addressing
+ constants vs hex values
+ write a test suite in assembler x86 which automatically checks the correctness of all instructions
