PPSSPP for Windows Phone (8)?

[Dissonance]

IIRC historically it was used to accelerate Forth interpreters in the days before binary translation was developed or practical given the memory constraints. For a given number of emulated instructions the technique will use less memory than a dynarec because you are only caching function pointers rather than blocks of code. If you structure the interpreter to eliminate branches in the leaf functions as far as possible such that each possible instruction is a singular leaf function then you are seeing a considerable saving by skipping the decode (by having stored its previous result as a function pointer then calling it directly). I don't see "blowing the I-cache" as a certainty either, sure it's got some extra overhead from having to return to the top level fetch loop after each instruction but I think it will come down to how efficient your fetch code is and whether that will fit.

Regarding performance benefits my thinking was it would depend on the sophistication of the branch prediction and pipelining of the underlying hardware as to what the benefit would be for threaded interpretation vs a simple interpreter. While in comparison to dynarec it's going to depend on the cost of the call/return and call stack access and the aforementioned fetch routine.

As I said before, I'm mostly trying to dispell the myth that seems to be circulating that there is no method of accelerating a CPU emulation other than dynarec. Given that Windows Phone does have access to high end processors now (even if only in flagship devices). Then I don't see how long this attitude of "never going to happen" can persist at least for 5th gen emulation. I agree the commercial reward for the amount of work involved in porting a dynarec emulator to a threaded interpreter for Windows Phone's sake is near non-existent. The fact is that the technique apparently does yield performance benefits as demonstrated by EmiPSX. It's unfortunate that the developer hasn't been able to iron out more of the compatibility issues but I'd hope most emulator developers would understand the challenge involved and shouldn't be using this as an excuse for ignoring its achievements and their possible implications.