Emulator Discussion (NOT one of those stupid "I can't search" topics)

[awsmazinggenius 3]

I wanted to discuss emulators with the OC community:

What would the OC community think of an emulator? The ComputerCraft community is pretty open to the idea, as not everyone has a good PC that can just open Minecraft, but the OC community might have a different stance.

Would anyone object to an emulator with both CC and OC support? It's an idea I've had in mind for a little while, but those who feel that there is a heated competition between the mods might object to it.

Would you use the emulator? Why or why not?

That's all from me. Let the war-ahem, discussion-begin!

[Snakybo 1]

Most of the OC community is also part of the CC community 

 

An emulator for OC would be great, an emulator that supports both CC and OC would be even better!

 

However; it should be more as "click to add a computer", since you can have a different hardware setup for each computer.

[awsmazinggenius 3]

I planned for "Click to make a new computer setup" as it is important to test your program under different settings. I also plan on letting you switch between native mode and fallback mode. (I only plan on releasing this for Windows and Mac, though I guess it's Java, so I can release it on anything. If I do release it for other platforms, if the native library isn't available, you'll have to use fallback mode.)

[SpiritedDusty 3]

I've been working on an emulator in JS for a while now. It's OC only though.

[awsmazinggenius 3]

I was thinking of making this in Java, as it will save me a ton of time to not have to rewrite the whole mod. I can also implement LuaJ (for CC and fallback mode) if I use Java easily, and heck, I can still port it to a web applet (reference to 1lann's HTML5 web emulator) if I want to.

[asie 28]

All OC uses is the regular Lua 5.2 interpreter, which is written in C.

[awsmazinggenius 3]

I know that, but there is still stuff that I'll need to reimplement.

[Xfel 2]

An emulator would definetely be helpful. Actually, the modular nature of OC would make writing one rather easy. If CC was supported too, it would be nice, but I'm not sure if it's really feasible to add both to one system in regards of the different architectures.

 

As OC is open source, it would be best if we could use as much of the regular OC code as possible. I did that with computercraft a while ago and it worked quite well; the core logic from computercraft is strongly separated from minecraft specific classes. Unfortunately, this is not the case for opencomputers: The Architecture implementations could probably reused, but they depend on the global Settings class and on the minecraft save logic; and the Machine class is far too strongly integrated with Minecraft logic (eg. client-server) to be reused.

[SpiritedDusty 3]

I've stopped working on my emulator a while ago but while writing it, I was able to use a few bits of OC's source code to write the emulator. I used things such as, NativeLuaArchitecture and components' code.

 

The reason why I stopped working on the emulator is because, since OC 1.3 was coming out with breaking changes, I would have to redo a lot of the emulator. But since OC 1.3 changes are starting to show in commits, I might start working on the emulator again.

[ahhhcrap 2]

OC only: hell yeah. But with the trillions of peripherals, will it be able to handle?

OC+CC: I am super anti-CC, I used to watch yoglabs until they added CC (I m ade124 xd)

[Kilobyte 1]

I am working on my own emulator as well, slowly making progress. It is beeing written in scala and licensed under MIT, just as OC itself.