Michael J. Mahon wrote:
loop LDA $C056 NOP LDA $C057 JMP loop
Good example of how hardware speed can't be emulated with even very fast software...
I disagree. The better Commodore emulators (at least CCS64 and VICE) handle such stuff without any problem, as it was quite common to do such things in the Demo Scene. And Atari 2600 emulators would be impossible to run at all without being able to do this, as the machine has no frame buffer at all and all video is created by writing a few registers in real time.
What you have to do is to alternate between a cycle of processor emulation and a cycle of video emulation; at least conceptually, in practice you can run a full processor command as long as you keep track of which cycles can change relevant registers and memory cells. Then, real "real time" is not necessary.
-- Linards Ticmanis