Not really, think of it like a... CPU emulator? Ish? You have registers as variables in the program. If you have register a1 and you are at an instruction addin

Not really, think of it like a... CPU emulator? Ish? You have registers as variables in the program. If you have register a1 and you are at an instruction adding 1 to it, it will add 1 to the variable representing a1. So on and so forth. This works because, well, memory operations are mostly(all?) a CPU does so this "core" takes the program and does the same kind of memory operations the silicon would do, only in SW.