This is nuts. I learned Z80 as a kid and wrote tens of thousands of lines of code in it.
This isn’t just emulating the ISA, but the actual transistors. I could basically load the schematics of the Z80 on my computer and run it. That blows my mind. If Moore’s law keeps going, the simulation will be running at 2MHz in a few years and I guess I could play Meteor Mission II on it.
For some reason this really makes me feel very strongly that this is a simulator... within a simulator.
See also: Full simulation of MOS 6502 [0] by the Visual6502 team. The same team also did works on the Z80 [1], and it's actually the basis of the Z80 simulator presented in this article.
Shameless plug: I did a WASM "visual6502 remix" a little while ago with an integrated assembler and "execution history" (mostly for fun, but also because I found the original UI a bit hard to use for my emulator experiments, so I guess it was the same motivation as the Z80 Explorer project):
Eventually I want to do a version using the Z80 netlist of the visual6502 project as well (the actual transistor simulation code should remain the same, I used a C port of the visual6502 Javascript code called 'perfect6502'):
...I heard though that not all 'trap transistors' which should protect the Z80 from reverse engineering had been found and 'neutralized' in that netlist, so even though the ZEX test is running I'm not entirely sure whether the simulation still contains hidden problems (neither ZEXDOC nor ZEXALL have complete "coverage" of the Z80).
This isn’t just emulating the ISA, but the actual transistors. I could basically load the schematics of the Z80 on my computer and run it. That blows my mind. If Moore’s law keeps going, the simulation will be running at 2MHz in a few years and I guess I could play Meteor Mission II on it.
For some reason this really makes me feel very strongly that this is a simulator... within a simulator.