Jordan Lord

CuLeq - OISC Emulator

18 Dec 2017

GitHub

A one instruction set computer (OISC) emulator.

Culeq is a 16-bit machine based off the single 'subleq' instruction.

Culeq has 64K words of directly addressable RAM, or 128Kb.

The display is memory mapped.

Compiling

make

Usage

./build/culeq [binary file]

Example

./build/culeq examples/paint_screen.bin

  • This program paints the screen pink

  • It shows how slow having 1 instruction is

  • Even on 8-bit computers of the 80s, we'd expect it to clear the screen almost instantly

  • Unfortunately, I wasn't able to build any reasonable program for Culeq due to the complexity of writing programs with 1 instruction

  • I hope this still demonstrates somewhat what it can do

  • You can find other example programs in the examples directory

Tests

  • Run tests
./build/culeq

Memory Map

Utility From To
Null 0x0000 0x0000
User program/heap 0x0001 0xFC6F
Sprites 0xFC70 0xFE6F
Colours 0xFE70 0xFE7F
Character display 0xFE80 0xFFFF

Display

  • 32x12 characters

  • Character at (0, 0) will be address 0xFE80

  • Character at (2, 0) will be address 0xFE82

  • etc.

Character word

  • The character words exist in memory between 0xFE80 and 0xFFFF
  • The bits in the character are split as follows (from most (0th) to least (31st) significant):
Utility AND mask
Foreground colour 0xF000
Background colour 0x0F00
ASCII char code 0x00FF

Colours

  • The colours are stored in memory from 0xFE70 to 0xFE7F
  • That's 16 colours in total at one time
  • Here is how each colour word is split up:
Utility AND mask
Red 0xF000
Green 0x0F00
Blue 0x00F0

Default colour palette

  • These can be found hard-coded in src/colours_bin.h
Address Word Description
0xFE70 0x0000 Black
0xFE71 0xFFF0 White
0xFE72 0xF000 Red
0xFE73 0x0F00 Green
0xFE74 0x00F0 Blue
0xFE75 0xFF00 Yellow
0xFE76 0xF0F0 Pink
0xFE77 0x0FF0 Cyan
0xFE78 0x4440 Dark grey
0xFE79 0x8880 Grey
0xFE7A 0x8000 Dark red
0xFE7B 0x0800 Dark green
0xFE7C 0x0080 Dark blue
0xFE7D 0x8800 Gold
0xFE7E 0x8080 Purple
0xFE7F 0x0880 Teal
  • You can override these colours with your own 12-bit colours

Sprites

  • There are 256 sprites

  • There is 1 sprite for every ASCII character

  • Each sprite is 4x8 pixels

  • Each sprite requires 2 words in memory

    • Because 1 word is 16-bits which can represent a 4x4 square

  • Sprites are indexed in memory by their respective ASCII character

  • Sprites exist between 0xFC70 and 0xFE6F in memory

  • Default sprites can be found in src/sprites_bin.h

  • Most of the sprites haven't been defined since it was taking me so long!

Letter A example

  • Letter A
*  - 4
* * - A
* * - A
*** - E
* * - A
* * - A
* * - A
  • 1st word: 0x4AAE
  • 2nd word: 0xAAA0
  • Exists at 0xFCF2 (1st word) and 0xFCF3 (2st word)
    • ASCII code 65 = 0x41
    • 0xFC70 + (0x41 * 2)
    • 0xFC70 + 0x82
    • 0xFCF2

License

GNU General Public License v3.0