i8008-tools

Toolchain for development for Intel 8008 systems

Hosted version of emulator could be found there.

Assembly

Installation

Install globally:

npm install -g i8008-asm

Usage

Compiles program.i8008 into ROM image and store it into program.bin

i8008-asm program.i8008 program.bin 

You can omit output file name, in that case assembler would replace extension of input file name to .bin

Assembly Syntax

Comments started with #:

# comment

Labels could be used:

label:
  NOP
label2: INL

Each instruction should be on separate line and can have optional operand:

  instruction
  instruction operand

Operand could be one of the kind:

• 8-bit immediate value (in both hexadecimal and decimal forms)
• 14-bit address (in both hexadecimal and decimal forms)
• label name

List of instructions could be found here.

Sample program (writes specific values to RAM up to 0x4000 and then reads and verifies them back):

write_incH: LHI 0x01
            LLI 0x00
write_incL: LMH
            INL
            LML
            INL
            JFZ write_incL
            INH
            LAH
            CPI 0x40
            JFZ write_incH
            LHI 0x01
read_incH:  LLI 0x00
read_incL:  LAM
            CPH
            JFZ error
            INL
            LAM
            CPL
            JFZ error
            INL
            JFZ read_incL
            INH
            LAH
            CPI 0x40
            JFZ read_incH
            LHI 0x00
error:      LAH
            OUT 8
            HLT

Module/Programmatic Usage

i8008-asm can be used as a module:

import { compile } from 'i8008-asm';

const { bytecode, errors, symbols } = compile('HLT');
if (errors?.length) {
  console.log('COULD NOT PARSE SOURCE CODE!');
  console.log(errors);
  process.exit(1);
}

console.log(`First byte of ROM is ${bytecode[0]}`);

Preprocessor

Could be used before compilation and provides two main features.

Modularity

Allows to merge several physical files into single compilation target:

# foo.i8008

foo:
  LHI 0x10
  RET

# main.i8008

%include "foo.i8008"

main:
  CAL foo
  HLT

And after preprocessing main.i8008 we can successfully compile whole program.

Macro

Another useful feature is support for macros.

%define FOO 1

main:
  LAI $FOO
  HLT

Emulator

UI

Just run default web-server and open http://localhost:1234 in browser.

npm run serve

Module/Programmatic Usage

import Emulator from 'i8008-emu';

const system = new Emulator({ memoryDump: romDump });

const { registers } = system;
registers.B = 1;

while (!system.isFinished) {
  system.instruction();
}

console.log(`Program has finished, final value of register A is ${registers.A}`);