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Cyclone 68000

Cyclone 68000 is an assembler 68000 emulator for low-powered ARM-based machines such as the Pocket PC and a number of mobile phones.

This is quite exciting because a number of devices are becoming capabile of playing 68000-games, however the critical factor is battery life. A Pocket PC cpu runs at up to 400Mhz, more than enough to emulate an 8Mhz 68000, however the highly-clocked ARM causes the battery to run out in about 2-4 hours.

At the other extreme a typical Nokia Mobile may run for 10-20 hours, and last for even longer with power saving, but only because it's clocked at about about 16-36Mhz (which wouldn't be enough to emulate a 68000).

Early profiling suggested Cyclone 68000 was capable of running a virtual 68000 at a very high speed: approximately 75Mhz on a 205Mhz StrongARM. However this was not a general case experiment and did not take into account the overhead for memory and graphics emulation. However it should at the very least be sigificantly faster than a C-based core.

No doubt as battery life is improved and emulator efficency improves, we will see more and more old games being truly pocketable.

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