Editing Hercules (emulator) (section)

==Design==
The emulator is written almost entirely in [[C (programming language)|C]]. Its developers ruled out using machine-specific [[Assembly language|assembly]] code to avoid problems with portability even though such code could significantly improve performance. There are two exceptions: Hercules uses hardware assists to provide inter-processor consistency when emulating multiple CPUs on SMP host systems, and Hercules uses assembler assists to convert between [[endianness|little-endian]] and big-endian data on platforms where the operating system provides such services and on [[x86]]/[[x86-64]] processors.