s68k v3.0.7

s68k

A rust interpreter for m68k with semantic checker. It compiles to WASM to be used with javascript and node.js, available on npm.

Typescript library documentation

Purpose

The purpose of this interpreter is to help people learn the basics of assembly, in this case m68k, by providing useful errors and hints like a modern language, in the hope to help understand the addressing modes and learn the different instructions/directives. WARNING It wasn't made to assemble or make actual programs, but marely as a learning tool, don't expect 100% accuracy.

Workings

The interpreter is split into individual modules that can be used standalone for different purposes

• Lexer: Has the job to identify the lines and the operands, it does no semantic or syntax checks and is left as generic as possible so that whatever piece of text can be fed to it and parsed

• Semantic checker: Has the job to verify that the lexed code is valid and reports useful errors so that the programmer can quickly identify and solve the problem. An example of this is the addressing modes, it will see if the addressing mode is not available, and hint which are. The semantic checker does not do further parsing

• Program compiler : it will do a final processing of the code, like converting the immediates to actual numbers, registers to indexes, prepares the table of labels, etc...

• Interpreter: Fed the compiled program, it will execute the program, it also allows to step through it, in the future breakpoints will be added

WARNING as this is only an interpreter, it does not load the actual program in memory so it won't be possible to modify instructions at runtime, it is left to the developer to align the memory correctly as every instruction is 4bytes long and the the PC is incremented by 4 everytime.

Might do

• Assembler
• Disassembler (unlikely)

Supported instructions

Supported directives

equ, org, dc, ds, dcb

Todo

✅ Add more instructions

• Add more directives
• Add END directive
• Add tests

Known bugs

1. Not really a bug but a decision to make, characters are treated as UTF-8, so encoding and decoding might problematic for some front ends, alternative would be to allow only extended ASCII characters 0-255.
2. The "lexer" for the arithmetical expression uses a simple regex, if a string has multiple characters in it, it will treat it all as a single string, ex: #'a'+'b' will be treated as #''a'+'b'' (a single string)
3. Some instructions have different valid addressing modes based off the destination, for example the add instruction allows only some operands if the destination is a memory access, this distinction needs to be added to the semantic checker.

How to run rust

Firstly make sure you have rust installed, you can download it here, once done, clone the repository on your machine and run cargo run in the root folder of the project. This will run the interpreter with the code inside of code-to-run.asm file.

How to build WASM binary

The interpreter was made for WASM in mind, to build it you need wasm-pack installed. Once installed you can build the project by running npm run build-wasm in the ts-lib folder of the project. This will create a pkg folder in the ts-lib one with the compiled code.

How to try the WASM binary locally

Inside of the web folder there is a very basic website with the library imported from the pkg folder WARNING not the ts-lib one, but in the root foler, to build it you need to run wasm-pack build in the root. You can test the package by running npm install to install dependencies and then npm run start to start the server. The website will be available at http://localhost:3000