I'm trying to port FCE Ultra to a WinCE 2.11
machine (IBM Z50) running on a MIPS VR4121
at 131 Mhz. Speed is a major concern since
now it's quite slow, even with frameskipping
and with sound off.
I remember I could run Nesticle 0.42+ on
a 486DX2-66Mhz and still get more or less
half to full framerate. (The windows port was
slower than the DOS version, but still not
too bad)

Does anyone know or have a conjecture on why
their emulator was so fast?

1) Pure assembly? Mostly Assembly?
(Well written assembly usually can speed
up your code about 2x or so?)

2) Any kind of dynamic recompilation going on?
(I serious doubt it though)

3) Do they do analysis of code paths to eliminate
or speed up certain operations? HLE at the
sprite level or something like that?

4) Anything else that may help speed up the code?

Any thoughts appreciated,