A fast emulator for ARM-based embedded systems

This paper presents a high-performance implementation for an Intel 8080 emulator on a Raspberry Pi device. The problem was defined as a software contest in MEMOCODE 2014 and this implementation took the second place in this contest. We deployed several optimization techniques and employed best programming practices to increase the performance of the naïve reference implementation. Improving data structure usage and modifying function calls are the techniques that resulted in higher performance of this implementation. Our implementation has about 2.5 times speedup over the reference code of the contest.