ZX8301

90% of the PS2’s floating point throughput is in the two vector units, not the R5900 conducting them. Concentrating on that, as the article does, seems as futile as focussing on the 68000 rather than the Amiga PAD in a 16-bit context (ignoring the EE’s 16-bit RAMBUS bottleneck).

However that approach will probably suit the least-ambitious PC-ports to PS2 (by studios that didn’t appreciate the difference) - rather as an ST emulator was a short cut to run the simplest Amiga games.

Claims of ‘firsts’ undermine the authority of this document, though not the achievements of the subject.

For instance Marco Ternelli’s dynamic binary translator ZM/HT dates back to 1993, when it was published by Ergon Development. It translates Z80 to 68000 machine code on the fly and was a successful commercial product. I’d be interested to hear of earlier JIT binary to binary implementations, especially others which coped with self-modifying code, without which ZM/HT wouldn’t have been very useful.

Self-unpacking executables are at least a decade older, and Fabrice quite likely had Microsoft’s 1985 EXEPACK, written by Reuben Borman, on his computer when he came up with LZEXE. That was bundled with MASM and Microsoft C 3.0, their first in-house version. Both were preceded by Realia’s Spacemaker product, which Wikipedia says was written by Robert B. K. Dewar in 1982.