Dioscuri

Dioscuri - the modular emulator

 

Dioscuri is an x86 computer hardware emulator written in Java. It is designed by the digital preservation community to ensure documents and programs from the past can still be accessed in the future.

 

The Dioscuri emulator has two key features: it is durable and flexible. Because it is implemented in Java, it can be ported to any computer platform which supports the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), without any extra effort. This reduces the risk that emulation will fail to work on a single architecture in the future, as it will continue to work on another architecture.

 

Dioscuri is flexible because it is completely component-based. Each hardware component is emulated by a software surrogate called a module. Combining several modules allows the user to configure any computer system, as long as these modules are compatible. New or upgraded modules can be added to the software library, giving the emulator the capability to run these.