My pet project

[masmjtd]

I want to say to begin with that I have downloaded the MASM32 package and I am impressed with the quality of the product.  :thumbu
I have been silent in the forums, but I have been reading and learning. I am working on a project that is going to have a steep learning curve. That's OK because I am not under time pressure and this is just for self education. I have been designing a computer architecture on paper, and now I wan't to do some simulation to prove some concepts. I have found a free simulation package out of the University of Edinburgh, Scotland that is written in Java. Here is the website for anyone who is interested:

http://www.icsa.inf.ed.ac.uk/research/groups/hase/simjava/

After writing the simulator, I  want to write an Assembler and and a C compller for the Architecture. For now I need to learn the Java programming language, and then learn how to program a simulator using the classes provided in the Simjava package. I have found so far that it should not be hard to emulate most of the opcodes in Java, even though they will run much slower that on real hardware. I think I'd like to stay away from dropping into assembler if I can help it, just because it would be nice to be able to end up with a pacakge that could be downloaded from the web and run on any machine.

Someday, if and when everything is working, and the architecture is proven, I'd like to write an emulator that runs software complied to the new architeure as fast as possible on an x86 machine. This would probable be done in C with calls to DLLs written in Assembler.

Hutch - I really like the MASM32 editor. It is so simple and powerful. I have used it to do the Assembler examples, and I have also used it for trying out HTML and JAVA examples in the Java tutorial. I was wondering whether you could make the Project and Tools customizable to be used with different languages. I realize that the Makeit.bat option give a lot of flexibility, but it would be nice if the user could add, delete and modify the menu options under Tools and Projects, and change the command line options on the Run button. Just a thought. I think if you did these simple steps, the editor could be used with a wide variety of programming languages.

Well it is getting late. If anyone wants to discuss my project, I'd be glad to share more details and take any suggestions of how to go about doing it. I know I will need some help when it comes to the compiler and assembler design. I also would welcome any ideas in what you would think an ideal computer architecture would look like, when approaching it from a programmers perspective.


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Link fixed
- sluggy