MMIX LOGO

MMIX Video Display

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This page describes an extension of MMIX that has an integrated black and white Video display.

Last update: Nov. 16, 2000: slight performance improvement.

This program works only on Win32 systems. My implementation has been compiled with the cygwin environment.

MMIX-Memory starting from address #5000000000000000 is devoted to Video RAM which gets mapped to a separate window with320*240 Pixels during simulation. Origin is in the upper left corner as usual and the y-axis is oriented downwards. Memory is mapped to the display in big-endian format, i. e. the least significant bit of the byte (or Octa) at address #5000000000000000 appears at coordinate (0,0). Consecutive Octas are mapped to the display line by line.

To draw the pixel at coordinate (x, y), the bit at position x mod 8 of byte y*40 + x div 8 has to be set to one.

The simulation is quite slow, since the complete video-memory is mapped after each write-access to it. However, I'm glad for any suggetions for improvement.

The mmixwin program can either be started from the command-line (which does not work with the bash of cygwin on my computer) with the command line arguments as usual, or it can be started without arguments, e.g. by double-clicking it from a file manager. In the latter case, a file open dialog appears for selection of the mmo-file to simulate and then a dialog comes up for setting some options. However, the options dialog is not yet completely implemented. Especially arguments to the MMIX program itself cannot yet be provided :-(

The downloadable zip-file contains:

mmix-sim.ch The change file to mmix-sim.w
mmixwin.exe Executable compiled using cygwin gcc
mmixwin.res Compiled resource file
mmixwin.rc Resource description
resource.c Header for resources
win32typ.w Defines Windows data types for ctangle
circle.mms Demo program that draws the circle
circle.mmo Assembled demo program

Using cygwin, the following line should be used (or integrated into the makefile...):
gcc -s -mwindows mmixwin.res -mno-cygwin mmix-arith.c mmix-io.c mmix-sim.c -e _mainCRTStartup -o mmixwin.exe -lmsvcrt -static
Note that the resource file mmixwin.res has to be linked as well. The resource file has to be compiled as follows:
windres mmixwin.rc -O coff -o mmixwin.res

For correstions, suggestions or comments please reply to ab@cs.hm.edu

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