how to start on cycle accurate simulations?

I don't know if this is the right place to ask this question, But I will ask it anyway.

there are lots of cycle accurate simulators out there, all of them are intended for x86 architecture, some extended to be a full system simulator that could work as a virtual machine.
what if I need to write my own cycle accurate simulator for something else? possibly to explore a design before going down to RTL level. I tried to find books or tutorials about that, No luck though. I also tried to go through the open source code of two of the x86 simulators, They use a lot of inline assembly and modified standard functions!! I would prefer to leave that as a last resort.

my question now is, could anyone recommend a good book or online tutorial or anything to start from? or do I have to go through these codes to understand their operations.

what is your objective?
design a chip?

to be exact, the design will be a simple processor core and a memory hierarchy. the FINAL target is to build a chip, but lots of architectural changes will have to be done in memory and the core itself to explore performance issues before starting.
in brief, we need to build a full processor simulator, something like PTLsim for example, but for a different architecture, an architecture that is yet to exist !!

what we done for a similar challenge, we have made the design in SystemC, to have a executable usable by software designer.