SMIS ASM Project

SMIS is a personal project that I hope can serve as a learning tool for those learning about computer architecture and design.

What does SMIS mean, anyway?

Well, it is short for "Simple Monolength Instruction Set," and it was designed from the ground up to be a pseudo-architecture/assembly language for beginners in hardware/software interface studies.

How does it accomplish this goal?

• It avoids most of the complexity that comes with implementing the x86 instruction set (because of both the number of instructions, and the complex nature of each)
• It avoids the occasionally cryptic names of the ARM instruction set (LDURSB etc.), and provides a larger number of basic instructions so as to avoid the need for highly-verbose code
• All instructions are named in a clear way (I'm looking at you, x86)
• All instructions are the same length (32 bits)
• All opcodes are the same length (8 bits) and are just numbers with no special meaning to any of the individual bits, as in ARM
• The syntax is strict and highly consistent, making it simpler to learn and simpler to interpret others' code

For now the SMIS toolsuite includes an assembler and a disassembler for SMIS ASM, along with a CPU emulator for running your ASM code. If you are unfamiliar with these terms, an assembler takes ASM code and converts it into machine code, a disassembler takes machine code and converts it back to ASM, an an emulator runs the code through a translation layer.

Getting Started

Here's how to start writing in SMIS:

git clone https://code.lthoerner.com/smis && cd smis
cargo build --release
# Add the ./target/release directory to your PATH (this varies between operating systems and shells)
smis --help

You must have Cargo installed on your system in order to build the program.

Once you write your code in a .txt file, you can assemble it into a .bin file by typing smis assemble <your_asm_file.txt> <target_output_file.bin>.

The assembled code can be run through the emulator using smis run <your_executable.bin>.

If you want to disassemble a file, use smis disassemble <your_executable.bin> <target_output_file.txt>.

If you need any help, you may check the documentation PDF at https://code.lthoerner.com/blob/main/Documentation/SMIS.pdf, or contact me through Github.