Tiny i8080 emulator / Blog: Recent posts

I tried to contact the original author of this project but without success.. I would like to share some improvements of this emulator, in particular the video upating I made faster thanks to a trick that I discovered about the pinned pointer.
Original code: //GCHandle handlex = GCHandle.Alloc(vram, GCHandleType.Pinned);
This method is mandatory but it tends to slowdown the video updating. So I found the way to avoid allocating a handle for the video memory buffer (see the example) to update the bitmap directly in memory, I do not know if it is totally safe, currently not from any problem, but it works very well and accelerates the updating of the screen.
In the assembly state.cs, inside the function VideoUpdate you may notice that the Marshal method works without need allocating the pinned handle. To do this we need to define the vram array, ptr, bmap as static. I hope I have not said a crazy stuff! :-)... read more

Because I deleted the file .gitignore that was wrong, otherwise when I run the command 'git update' were not updated some bitmaps that needed to this project.