Macro Instruction Set Generation

Having got that out of my system,  I have actually been doing something productive. I've added the CPU Core generator to the links on the right.

This is a bit like a specialised macro processor - it's a program in Python and a definition file which contains macro style definitions for the processor. It looks a bit like this (these are three real examples).

0B    "EXBLA"     _temp = A;A = BL;BL = _temp
5F    "LBL @"     _temp = fetch();BL = _temp & 0xF;BM = _temp >> 4    
18-1B "LDA {O}"   A = {M};BM = BM ^ 0x{O}

The first one is a simple instruction "EXBLA" which exchanges A and Bl. The second one is a two byte instruction (that's what the '@' is for that fetches an operand and puts it into BL and BM.  The final one is three instructions , 18-1B which generate instructions LDA 0, LDA 1, LDA 2, LDA 3 - each reads memory into A and the exclusive or's the Bm register with 0-3 respectively.

The macroprocessor scans it, chucks the comments and produces two files. One is the innards of a huge switch() statement - for the first one it would generated something like:

case 0x0B: /* exbla */
   _temp = A;A = BL;BL = _temp;
   break;

and it also creates an array of all the mnemonic names which the disassembler built into the emulation shell uses. These are cut and pasted into Eclipse.

This does produce a very long and unwieldy case statement. But it does have some advantages. Any error can be corrected by changing the definition file and will fix everything consequently. It keeps the Java compiler generating a table jump rather than a sequence of If statements which it does if the case is sparsely populated. Where it wastes is things like TM which has 64 near identical instructions which vary only in their single parameter.But what I've found is that this doesn't seem to balloon the code, which is probably down to the compiler.

So then that's wrapped in a simple processor shell which has some methods for handling the more complex instructions. Hardware stuff is passed of to an Interface which represents the I/O pins.

The next stage is to make it work as an emulator. Which I've actually already done so I will write another post immediately following this.