[phire]

There is a lot of space between interpreters and a full JIT that is under-explored. Because developers typically skip straight to a JIT when they find a interpreter isn't fast enough.

Dolphin does have the cached interpreter, which eliminates some of the decoding overhead of a traditional interpreter, but I think you could go a lot further. Convert the PowerPC instructions to a optimal bytecode and apply various optimisations to that bytecode (function inlining, constant propagation). Common pairs and sequences of instructions can be replaced with a single bytecode implementation.

Given how fast Apple's cpu cores are, I suspect it might be possible to get a optimising bytecode interpreter fast enough so GameCube and other 6th gen console emulators can run at full speed.

[int_19h]

I wonder how fast something like Forth-style direct threaded code could be on Apple silicon.