FPGA x86 Processor

If this is his final EE project as said on the page, in my opinion the main focus of the project is to have a working proof of concept of an implementation of a X86 processor on a FPGA.

He wouldn't have the time to build a fully ready to market X86 processor all by himself, I think.

Not saying that its simple to implement an 8086, but it should be significantly easier than implementing an 80386/80486 (which is what one would expect today as a minimum when referring to it as x86).

You mean a processor where all of the complex opcodes are implemented in loadable microcode?

If bochs doesn't do enough, it would probably be easier to hack it up to do what you need.

You might try instrumenting bochs, which might both run your code faster, require less hardware and give you more accurate results. In many ways, bochs is much better built for the type of thing you want.

edit: grammar

[1] http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/pin-a-dynamic-binar...

I don't want to be working at that level every day but it sure was a fun project.

Honestly, when I'm debugging hardware where I have the high level specifications, the microarchitecture spec and the system verilog files that implemented the design it's still kind of a pain to trace things.

The other downside of having all the signals is that little things can be unintentionally misleading. As an example I was working with coworker trying to trace a memory transaction through some complicated logic blocks and there was a point we originally missed where the bottom few bits of an address aren't necessary for the hardware. Later after this point the bottom bits were reused to communicate transaction properties along with the significant address bits. There was a bit of confusion about why we were reading a "bad address" before we realized what happened.