[clug-talk] Emuators/VM's

[simon at mungewell.org]

> We are looking for a more effective way of testing images before
> deploying them out in to the world & besides imaging the actual
> hardware, I am not sure if ther is anyway to do this.

I think you need to clarify in you mind the difference between an emulator
and a Virtualiser.

An emulator is a piece of code which models a CPU/Memory/Devices/etc (such
as http://bochs.sourceforge.net/)

An virtualiser is a piece of code which absracts the real CPU/Memory/etc
on  a machine so that it can pretend to run multiple instances or OS.

>
> So apart from that can any suggest anything else or maybe where mght
> find emulators of that ilk.  I have though of the obvious bit of
> actually contacting the manufacturers, but I amnot even sure they have
> anything like that.

If you are porting to a ZX Spectrum (or other ancient games console) you
should be good. There are some emulators for phones, etc but those just
fake up the Java enviroment.

If you are coding with a platform independent toolkit you should be OK
too....

Simon