Simulator comparisons/reviews?

What do you mean by simple simulators -- lacking any I/O and interrupt handling, lacking trace buffers, lacking data access breakpoints, lacking high level language / user symbol support?

If you have a single processor or a few, it would probably be better to find simulators for just those processors. Most packages, I think, would tend to be bundled with compiler/assembler packages. Some vendors support several different processors, but tend to charge for each architecture separately.

In my experience, there is a big variety of simulator interfaces and support for debugging, as mentioned above. Some are much better than others at detecting faults, such as invalid memory access, stack overflow, etc.

Why are you looking to support as many processors as possible?

Thad

The requirement is primarily academic, for instruction-set comparisons. This means that I don't mind if it doesn't have good support for real-world debug-type stuff - interrupts, trace buffers, whatever. It does need some basic assembler and disassembler functionality, but no compiler. My preference would be for the fewest number of systems that between them handle the largest number of architectures... I guess this is a pretty tall order.

Thanks -

Evan ______________________________________ To get a valid mail address: s/m@/m1@/

For your purposes, evaluation copies of commercial packages would probably help fulfill requirements for several popular processors. In general I expect that you would need to download a separate emulator for each architecture. There may be some with multiple architectures (beyond simple options such as whether the processor includes an extended instruction set only found in some family members, such as built-in multiply), but I am not aware of them. If they exist, they would probably be freeware / academic exercises.

Thad

I've done several of these in recent years for compiler testing. If someone will supply a real email addres, we can talk about it.

Thanks guys. The from address above is real, with the exception that it needs an extra '1' character before the 'at' character.

Evan ______________________________________ To get a valid mail address: s/m@/m1@/