[c-nsp] Emulating 7200 hardware to run IOS

[Joost greene]

Hi,

Someone wrote a piece of software that emulates the hardware of 7200,
according to his claim, its 72XX, and you get the choice of choosing the
processor npe-200,npe-400,npe-g1.

Very helpful tool and it works, i tried it,

It loads the IOS given to it, and you can easily add interfaces, run
different instances of the software on one PC, although its a CPU hogger, my
question is, how is something like this written, i can imagine alot of chips
that are 'protected' and contains code that is needed to complete booting
and running the IOS/IOS features, is it just a matter of identifying the
hardware and writing a driver for it and writing a driver for the MIPS
processor to translate between it and pentium for example, i'd appreciate
any feedback on such software and is it legal or not to write one ? were
there any attempts before ?