Using a PC as an accelerator? Had an idea last night....

[jorkany]

BillHarrison,

What you're talking about is known as an in-circuit emulator (ICE). We used them where I worked years ago for OS development with processors such as the Z80, 6502, etc. However, given that modern CPUs practically have debugging built-in, I don't know if ICEs are even used anymore.

Anyway, your idea could possibly work assuming you can get the timing issues worked out, but what's the advantage? You have an old Amiga using a PC as a very fast CPU - then what? Don't all your 68K programs work fine as-is on a real CPU? And for those that you want to run faster, don't you have better software on your PC to do those tasks anyway?

Technically it's an interesting idea that may have some merit, but from a practical standpoint it's not worth doing. It's not like you're going to gain anything by running Lemmings faster, for example.

[jorkany]

BillHarrison,
   Just read through the replies after my first post in this thread, and saw this:

Wow! Who sells these and how come noone ever discusses them here?

Just google and you'll probably find several companies who make them for a variety of CPUs. Probably the reason they are not discussed here is, ICEs are a fairly esoteric device used primarily for debugging embedded operating systems. Not many people have cause to use them, and they aren't meant to replace a processor to "make things work faster".

You can also assume they are not cheap.