Atheist wrote:
For instance Power Packer, the source might not be available, so the JIT converts every instruction to PPC then runs it. I thought the JIT could be used to run the program, command by command, but instead of running, it saves the resulting commands into a file. Effectively converting it into a PPC program.
This is known as static translation rather than JIT's dynamic translation. There are several problems in getting this approach to work at all, including the difficulty of finding all the code, and self-modifying code (but any program in this category isn't properly written anyway).
I agree that there usually won't be much advantage over JIT in speed, but I'm not so sure about memory. Isn't it the case that UAE and Amithlon require many megabytes of JIT cache to perform well? Not many binaries are that large!
I've written a static translator for the Atari VCS, but that was relatively simple because the VCS is so basic and has it's code in ROM.
