GoKawiilThis post is likely the end of my series on retrowin32.
I bring you: Theseus, a new Windows/x86 emulator that translates programs statically, solving a bunch of emulation problems while surely introducing new ones.
What happened to retrowin32?
I haven't been working on retrowin32, my win32 emulator, in part due to life stuff and in part because I haven't been sure where I wanted to go with it. And then someone who had contributed to it in the past posted retrotick, their own web-based Windows emulator that looks better than my years of work, and commented on HN that it took them an hour with Claude.
This is not a post about AI, both because there are too many of those already and because I'm not yet sure of my own feelings on it. But one small thing I have been thinking about is that (1) AI has been slowly but surely climbing the junior to senior engineer ladder; and (2) one of the main pieces of being a senior engineer is better understanding what you ought to be building, as distinct from how to build it.
(Is that just the Innovator's Dilemma's concept of "retreating upmarket", applied to my own utility as a human? Not even sure. I am grateful I do this work for the journey, to satisfy my own curiosity, because that means I am not existentially threatened like a business would be in this situation. As Benny Feldman says: "I cheat at the casino by secretly not having an attachment to material wealth!")
So, Mr. Senior Engineer, what ought we build? What problem are we even solving with emulators, and how do our approaches meet that? I came to a kind of unorthodox solution that I'd like to tell you about!
Emulators and JITs
The simplest CPU emulator is very similar to an interpreter. An input program, after parsing, becomes x86 instructions like:
mov eax, 3 add eax, 4 call ... ; some Windows system API
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