Most of us who've played games or worked in any one of a number of popular programming languages will have used virtual machines but unless we've taken a course in programming language design we probably have only a loose idea of what these are and how they work. In this talk I'll look at the various parts necessary to model a computer-like machine in code, borrowing ideas as I go from real-world hardware design. We'll use a mixture of C and Ruby as our modelling languages: C is the lingua franca of the VM world whilst Ruby is the language which brought us monkey-patching...