I'm not a very experienced programmer, so the following question/suggestion may come as silly.

Looking at the Snes9X source code, I came across an interesting and important line:


It seems function pointers are used for executing opcodes. I am tempted to ask, wouldn't a switch statement be (at least somewhat) faster ? I base this statement on a quote I read some time ago:

(source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4708 ... erformance)

Nevermind. It seems optimizing compilers do a very good job of reducing this overhead. For example with MSVC 2010 the generated assembly for opcode calling is:

and the only overhead in opcode implementation functions is a "ret" instruction at the end of their code.