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Hardware Emulator

danger

The emulator itself is currently undocumented

I/O Devices​

As it would not make sense to emulate all I/O devices in the emulator -- they can change a lot and might be swapped out for each other -- the emulator can instead talk to simulated I/O devices via a simple TCP-based socket interface.

Graphics Unit​

A reasonable approximation of the graphics unit is implemented as socket_handler/gpu_accurate.py. Its behavior differs from the actual graphics unit in two ways:

  • The simulated graphics unit initializes its memory as all zeroes. The real hardware starts with random data that is not cleared automatically.
  • The simulated graphics card does not use the same font in text mode. This concerns special characters especially.
tip

socket_handler/server.py is an older simulator used for testing. It uses only the image mode. It should not be used for writing programs, or one might forget to set the image mode.