The aim of this work is to study, propose and implement a tool that allows the experimentation with architectures that follow the Network Processors (NP) paradigm. A generic object library was implemented, allowing the emulation of the various hardware components, such as memories, registers, arithmetic-and-logical units, control units etc., that are commonly used within specific architectures for protocol processing. The integrated usage of these components will provide an environment where virtual machines can be created and tested to verify the behavior of many different operations. Besides the library itself, three use cases are presented to validate and show the utility of the tool: the first is an implementation of a processor created just for the sake of testing and the other two are implementations of architectures based on the MCS85 processor and on the ARM kernel of the Intel IXP Network Processor.