Statically Recompiling NES Games into Native Executables with LLVM and Go (2013)
I have actually been rather obsessed with this lately. You'll see that there's a few problems he runs into that he deems insurmountable, which sounds like a challenge! Specifically, there's the issue with an instruction which is effectively a computed goto:<p>A jump instruction that takes an address and then jumps to the address STORED at that address. Since there is no way to know at compile time what addresses are going to stored at a place, you're forced to then dynamically emulate the whole memory space of the actual NES to accurately calculate it, thus defeating the whole point.<p>Is that the only solution though? a head scratcher!<p>Further are issues with parts of code that, on some level seems to be taking inspiration from genetics: Jump to one alignment, and the instructions get interpreted one way, jump to a different alignment and the same sequence of bytes is interpreted by the CPU as an entirely different set of instructions. I wonder if that could be resolved by creating a different source code path for each alignment using flow analysis- A space saving technique effectively getting uncompressed.