emu87

Start 80x87 floating-point emulator (QNX)

Syntax:

emu87 [-f] &

Options:

-f

Force the emulator to remain, even if floating-point hardware is present.

Description:

The emu87 starts the floating-point emulator which traps 80287 and 80387 floating-point instructions and emulates them through software. By default, the emulator will quietly terminate if you attempt to start it on a machine equipped with floating-point hardware. You can force the emulator to remain active by using the -f option.

The floating-point emulator is required if you wish to run programs that need floating-point support on a computer that doesn't have an 80X87 floating-point coprocessor.

The emu87 utility is not the emulator itself. Instead, it starts the following emulators:

emu387

an 80387 emulator for 32-bit programs

emu87_32 or emu87_16

an 80287 emulator for 16-bit programs. When a 32-bit process manager (Proc) is running, emu87_32 will be started. If an older 16-bit version of Proc is running (QNX 4.21 or earlier), emu87_16 will be started.

To remove an emulator, use the slay utility,

If you are running on a processor without hardware floating-point, and do wish to be able to run 16-bit floating-point programs, you may invoke emu387 directly thus avoiding unnecessarily starting emu87_32.

Never attempt to start or stop the emulator while processes are actively using floating-point, or those processes will fault on their next use of floating-point.

Examples:

Start the floating-point emulator:

    emu87 &

Files:

The emu87 utility may use several 80x87 emulators which are found in /bin:

• /bin/emu387
• /bin/emu87_32
• /bin/emu87_16