apricos-examples

Example apricos programs. The examples are in src/:

Example	What it shows	Needs the terminal?
add.asm	Adding two numbers using the stack	No
mult.asm	Multiplying by repeated addition, with a loop	No
conway.asm	Conway's Game of Life, drawn on the terminal, from a glider gun	Yes

All three are standalone programs: they don't need Apricot OS, and run directly in the simulator from address 0.

Requirements

To assemble the examples, you will need:

• apricosasm 1.3+

To run the examples, you will need:

• apricosim 0.9+

conway also needs the terminal emulator, and a simulator built with TTY emulation (aprsim -h should list the -f option):

• apricosterm

Assembling

From the src folder, run the assembler on all the examples:

cd src
java -jar /path/to/apricosasm.jar *.asm

This writes one .bin file per example (add.bin, mult.bin and conway.bin).

Executing the examples

In the simulator, m cycles between the three modes (state, instruction and run) and space steps, or starts and stops a run. q quits when the simulator isn't running, and F1 quits at any time.

add and mult

These examples don't print anything: you watch them work by stepping through them and looking at the accumulators in the simulator's register display.

aprsim add.bin
aprsim mult.bin

Press m once to switch to instruction mode, then press space to run one instruction at a time. add leaves 0xAA in $a1, and mult leaves 2 x 3 = 6 in $a2.

conway

conway draws on the terminal emulator, so it needs two terminal windows: one for apricosterm, which shows the board, and one for the simulator. They talk to each other through a named pipe (FIFO), which both programs must be given with -f.

1. In the first window, start the terminal emulator:

   apricosterm -f /tmp/apricos_fifo
   

2. In the second window, start the simulator with the same FIFO:

   aprsim -f /tmp/apricos_fifo conway.bin
   

   The simulator waits for the terminal to connect before it starts.

3. In the simulator, press m twice to switch to run mode, then space to start running.

The terminal shows an 80x30 board that starts with a Gosper glider gun, which fires a glider every 30 generations. The edges of the board wrap around, so the gliders eventually come back around and crash into the gun. Expect about a generation every two seconds: the simulator runs roughly 100,000 instructions a second.

Press space in the simulator to pause, and F1 to quit.

Licence

See LICENCE for details