Assembly-To-From-MachineLanguage

An assembler and disassembler for the low-level language hack assembly, which will convert hack assembly(.asm) files to machine language (.hack), and machine language files to hack assembly.

About

This program takes hack assembly (or .asm) files and assembles them into machine language (.hack), A.K.A, binary. I used the file extension .hack to represent machine language code. Not to be confused with the programming language hack, the .hack files in my program only consist of binary, or 1's and 0's.

The files you see that end with .asm or .hack are there pureley for testing. You can test it yourself to see the assembler/disassembler in action. You can also create your own files if you so wish. Assembling test.asm will result in the test.hack file and vice versa. The same is true for programTest.asm and programTest.hack. Of course, if you don't delete any of these, nothing will change when you run it through the program, as both the .hack and .asm files already exist, so no new files will be created.

Demo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT9SZdZqSJE

What is Hack Assembly?

The Hack Assembly Language consists of 3 types of instructions. It allows us to declare symbols with a single symbol declaration. Hack assembly ignores whitespace and you can write comments with //.

Types of Instructions

1. A-Instruction: Addressing instructions, used with a preceding @
2. C-Instruction: Computation instructions, used with either = or ;
3. L-Instruction: Labels (Symbols) declaration instructions, used with (symbol)

Predefined Symbols

• A: Address Register
• D: Data Register
• M: Refers to the register in Main Memory whose address is currently stored in A
• R0-R15: Addresses of 16 RAM Registers, mapped from 0 to 15
• SCREEN: Base address of the Screen Map in Main Memory, which is equal to 16384
• KBD: Keyboard Register address in Main Memory, which is equal to 24576

For a more in depth explanation of this language, visit https://www.coursera.org/lecture/build-a-computer/unit-6-2-the-hack-assembly-language-AYPo6

Dependencies

• Some way to compile and execute c++ code
• GNU Make (Not required, but makes executing easier)

Installing and Executing

• Download the source code from github, or clone the repository into Visual Studio
• If you wish to assemble a .asm to machine language code:
  • Add, or create the .asm file in the project folder with the assembly code in it.
  • Go to main.cpp and call the function assemble(file.asm);
• If you wish to disassemble machine language code to a .asm file:
  • Add, or create the .hack file in the project folder with machine language code (binary) in it. (I decided to use the .hack file extension to represent machine language code...not to be confused with the hack programming language)
  • Go to main.cpp and call the function disassemble(file.hack);
• You can dissassemble and assemble at the same time if you wish to do so
• Change directory to <path/to/projectFolder/src>
• Compile code how you like, or, run the command make
• After running make', execute by running the executeable run or run.exe
• The assembled .hack file and/or the disassembled .asm file will automatically be created in your project folder

Authors

Zachary Chi zachchi@tamu.edu

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE.md file for details