<p>A system and method for emulating inside a generic virtual machine all the hardware of a typical computing platform architecture. A translation system is provided wherein an original list of binary instructions is simultaneously converted to a number of optimised candidate lists of platform-independent instructions using a hand-coded look-up table. The candidate lists are then further optimised and the list that will maximise the execution speed of the original computer program on the platform-independent virtual machine is selected.</p>
