Resources

General

Author's web site, with PowerPoint slides, sample exams, quizzes, and programs.

Binary Number systems lessons from http://courses.cs.vt.edu/csonline/NumberSystems/Lessons/

MIPS

MIPS Quick Language Tutorial ( includes Register description, I/O description). MIPS programming examples.

Good web-based tutorial on MIPS from Bradley Kjell, Central Connecticut State University

See the CFX examples (select the SPIM language)

SPIM

Download SPIM simulator from http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~larus/spim.html. See also Larus' nice description of SPIM (pdf, also locally here.)

Version 1.04 of Mipster (a SPIM editor), or download the files. The latest version can be purchased (~ $10) from the Downcast Systems site.

Description of SPIM: Appendix A, written by James Larus, found in Hennessy & Patterson, Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface (78 pages, 356KB as a PDF). Within Appendix A, section A-39 describes UNIX versions of SPIM. For a description of the Windows version of SPIM, see here (pdf), or locally here.

Sweetman, Dominic. See MIPS Run. c. 2002 by Academic Press, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.

Running SPIM on the CS lab Sun workstations (courtesy of Pat Troy):

You will need to use some text editor (vi, pico, xedit ...) to create a file with a .s extension. Then you will load this file into xspim as described below.

The program is in the directory: /usr/local/spim/bin/. For convenience to run the program, you can add the following line in your .tcshrc file:
     set path=(/usr/local/spim/bin/ $path)
After this, you can directly run the program by typing “xspim”.

How to load an assembly file:
     Click the button “load” in xspim and then type the file name. Note: If your “xspim” doesn’t run in the directory where your assembly files is, you have to type the file name with its complete directory in order to load the file into Xspim.

Alternatively you can run spim from the command line. As above, you would need to edit your "*.s" file using some text editor. Then to start spim you would type:
      /usr/local/spim/bin/spim
Once in the program, list commands using
     ?
To read in your file (e.g. sample.s) type
     read "sample.s"
where you must include the quotes. Then run using the ru command.

A good overview of MIPS and SPIM given at http://edge.mcs.drexel.edu/GICL/people/sevy/architecture/MIPSRef(SPIM).html

MythSim

See Getting Started with Mythsim.

Download a Java version at http://www.mythsim.org. See the manual section for a datapath diagram, quick reference card, and past handouts.

Once you understand how Mythsim works, you may want to use the Memfile generator written by Scott Price. This allows you to create the microcode file along with special comments and then generate the memfile from assembler. See the documentation file (doc) and the executable (jar), or browse all the files in the directory, including the zip file.