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Consolite Assembly

Consolite's assembly language is the input format required for the assembler. Details are given here about the constructs of the assembly language and the usage of its instructions.

Comments

Comments in Consolite assembly start with a semicolon. From the first occurrence of ; to the end of the line is ignored. For example:

ADD A B           ; I'm a comment! I don't affect the code.

Labels

Labels in Consolite assembly refer to the address of the instruction or data that follows. A label starts with a letter or an underscore and is followed by zero or more alphanumeric or underscore characters. A label declaration ends in a colon and is on a line by itself, whereas a label reference is used as part of an instruction. For example:

label:             ; This is a label declaration
ADD A C
CMP A B
JNE label          ; This is a label reference.

Label declarations are often used at the start of functions or loops so that you can jump to an address by name instead of giving the assembler a literal numeric address that you have to update manually when the code changes. The assembler finds labels on the first pass and calculates their addresses, then substitues in the address value on the second pass. For example:

MOVI A 0x0         ; Each instruction is 4 bytes, so the ADD
MOVI B 0x1         ; instruction that 'label' points to starts
MOVI C 0x5         ; on address 0xc.
label:
ADD A B
CMP A C
JB label           ; This will be replaced with 'JB 0xc' by the assembler.

Data

The only type of data that Consolite assembly can currently parse is hexadecimal. Consolite is Big Endian, so the value 0x1234 will be translated as the byte 0x12 followed by the byte 0x34. Data can be used in some instructions, and they usually have a 16-bit or 8-bit limit. For example:

MOVI A 0x1234      ; MOVI can take up to a 16-bit value.
RET 0x12           ; RET can only take an 8-bit value.

Data can also be declared on a line by itself, and will be padded with trailing zero bytes to meet 4-byte alignment. You can prefix data with a label for using something like named global variables. For example:

LOADI A data       ; Load the first 16 bits of 'data' into register A.
MOVI C 0x1
ADD A C            ; Add 1 to register A.
STORI A data       ; Store the modified value.

data:              ; A label for referencing the start of the data
0x0024 0x3244 0xbc993211 0x4  ; Multiple data declarations on one line

Registers

There are 16 addressable registers in Consolite. These are SP, the stack pointer; FP, the frame pointer; and A through N, 14 general purpose registers. These can also be referred to as R0 through R15, where R0 is SP, R1 is FP, and R2 through R15 are A through N. The former format is preferred, however.

Each of these registers is 16 bits. Since there is a limit of 64KiB of main memory, each register can store an absolute address to any byte in memory.

There is also an instruction pointer register, which is only accessible through the CALL and RET instructions. The instruction pointer only has 14 bits since it must be 4-byte aligned. Jumping to an address that is not 4-byte aligned will cause the address to be truncated to 14 bits.

The color register is write-only, and stores the value of the current color to be drawn to the screen with the PIXEL instruction. To set the current color, use COLOR <REG>. Since the color is only 8-bit, the lower 8 bits in the provided register will be used. The high 8 bits are ignored.

The flags register is not directly accessible, but is set by arithmetic and bitwise instructions. The values of the flags are used in variations of the JMP instrution, detailed later under Instructions. There are four flags:

  • Overflow flag (OF), used to signify signed arithmetic overflow or underflow.
  • Carry flag (CF), used to signify unsigned arithmetic overflow or underflow.
  • Zero flag (ZF), used to signify the result of the last instruction was zero.
  • Sign flag (SF), used to signify the result of the last instruction was negative.

Instructions

Consolite assembly currently has 45 instructions. This section details the syntax and effects of each instruction. All DATA values are 16-bit unless otherwise indicated.

Load and Store

  • MOV REG1 REG2 - Copies the data in REG2 to REG1.
  • MOVI REG1 LABEL|DATA - Copies the the address of LABEL or the literal DATA to REG1.
  • LOAD REG1 REG2 - Loads the 2 bytes stored at location REG2 and stores them in REG1.
  • LOADI REG1 LABEL|DATA - Loads the 2 bytes stored at the address given by LABEL|DATA and stores them in REG1.
  • STOR REG1 REG2 - Stores the value of REG1 to the address of REG2 in main memory.
  • STORI REG1 LABEL|DATA - Stores the value of REG1 to the literal address given by LABEL|DATA. LABEL|DATA and stores it in REG1.
  • PUSH REG - Pushes the value of REG onto the stack and increments the stack pointer.
  • POP REG - Pops the value off the top of the stack and stores it in REG and decrements the stack pointer.

Arithmetic

  • ADD REG1 REG2 - Stores the value of REG1 + REG2 in REG1.
  • SUB REG1 REG2 - Stores the value of REG1 - REG2 in REG1.
  • MUL REG1 REG2 - Stores the value of REG1 * REG2 in REG1.
  • DIV REG1 REG2 - Stores the value of REG1 / REG2 in REG1.

Bitwise

  • AND REG1 REG2 - Stores the value of REG1 & REG2 in REG1.
  • OR REG1 REG2 - Stores the value of REG1 | REG2 in REG1.
  • XOR REG1 REG2 - Stores the value of REG1 ^ REG2 in REG1.
  • SHL REG1 REG2 - Stores the value of REG1 << REG2 in REG1.
  • SHRA REG1 REG2 - Stores the value of REG1 >> REG2 in REG1, where >> is an arithmetic right shift, meaning it will sign-extend REG1.
  • SHRL REG1 REG2 - Stores the value of REG1 >> REG2 in REG1, where >> is a logical right shift, meaning it will not sign-extend REG1.

Graphics

  • COLOR REG - Sets the color register as the lower 8 bits of REG. See the Colors section below for information on the color format.
  • PIXEL REG1 REG2 - Draws a pixel on the screen with the current value of the color register. The lower 8 bits of REG1 are the x-coordinate, and the lower 8 bits of REG2 are the y-coordinate.

Input

  • INPUT REG1 REG2 - Stores in REG1 the status of the input with input_id stored in REG2.

Timing

  • TIME REG - Stores the time (in milliseconds) since the last TIMERST instruction in REG.
  • TIMERST - Resets the timing counter to zero.

Control Flow

The names for the jump instructions assume that the CMP instruction was used to set flags. For example, if we are testing for less than or equal to:

MOVI A 0x1
MOVI B 0x3
CMP A B
JLE some_label         ; Will jump if A <= B
  • CALL LABEL|DATA - Pushes the instruction pointer onto the stack and jumps to the address given by LABEL|DATA.
  • RET [DATA] - Pops the instruction pointer off the stack and jumps to it, optionally popping DATA more bytes off the stack. DATA is a maximum of 8 bits.
  • CMP REG1 REG2 - Does the operation REG1 - REG2 and discards the result, but sets flags.
  • TST REG1 REG2 - Does the operation REG1 & REG2 and discards the result, but sets flags.
  • JMP REG - Unconditional jump to the address stored in REG.
  • JMPI LABEL|DATA - Unconditional jump to the address given by LABEL|DATA.
  • JEQ LABEL|DATA - Jump to the address given by LABEL|DATA if the zero flag is set.
  • JNE LABEL|DATA - Jump if the zero flag is not set.
  • JG LABEL|DATA - 'Jump greater than', jump if the zero flag is not set and the sign flag equals the overflow flag.
  • JGE LABEL|DATA - 'Jump greater than or equal to', jump if the sign flag equals the overflow flag.
  • JA LABEL|DATA - 'Jump if above', jump if the carry flag is not set and the zero flag is not set.
  • JAE LABEL|DATA - 'Jump if above or equal to', jump if the carry flag is not set.
  • JL LABEL|DATA - 'Jump less than', jump if the sign flag does not equal the overflow flag.
  • JLE LABEL|DATA - 'Jump less than or equal to', jump if the sign flag does not equal the overflow flag or if the zero flag is set.
  • JB LABEL|DATA - 'Jump if below', jump if the carry flag is set.
  • JBE LABEL|DATA - 'Jump if below or equal to', jump if the carry flag is set or the zero flag is set.
  • JO LABEL|DATA - 'Jump on overflow', jump if the overflow flag is set.
  • JNO LABEL|DATA - 'Jump on no overflow', jump if the overflow flag is not set.
  • JS LABEL|DATA - 'Jump on sign flag', jump if the sign flag is set.
  • JNS LABEL|DATA - 'Jump on no sign flag', jump if the sign flag is not set.

Miscellaneous

  • NOP - Does nothing for one cycle.
  • RND REG - Gets 16 random bits and stores them in REG.

Colors

Consolite has 8-bit color in an RGB format. The first three bits are red, the middle three bits are green, and the lower three bits are blue. For example, 111 000 00 would be fully red, 000 111 00 would be fully green, and 000 000 11 would be fully blue.