Project "EightySix"

Eightysix is a partial 8086 assembler / simulator. The 8086 was a 16-bit microprocessor designed by Intel and gave rise to the well known x86 architecture. The philosophy driving this project is performance-oriented, a term coined by the software engineer Casey Muratori. He has an entire course dedicated to this principle:

• Perfomance-Aware Programming by Casey Muratori.

1. Getting started

Download the .zip from this page, or run this command inside the desired directory.

$ git clone https://github.com/rhuibertsjr/eightysix
$ cd eightysix

1.1 Building

Building the Eightysix codebase can be done in a terminal which is equipped with the ability to call either MSVC (Windows 10+) or GNU GCC on a GNU / Linux machine. On a Windows machine call the following script:

$ build.bat 

Or on a GNU / Linux machine:

$ ./scripts/build.sh 

Note: Visual Studio 2020 (Community) Edition is needed for the use of the MSVC build. Then vcvarsall.bat x64 has to be called in your terminal to setupt the right enviroment variables.

1.2 Running

Running the Eightysix codebase can be done by running eightysix.exe (or `eightysix), or by the following scripts:

$ start.bat 

Or on a GNU / Linux machine:

$ ./scripts/start.sh 

This will give you the following prompt:

$ start.bat 
  (EightyOne) Usage: '%s [DEST FILE] [SOURCE FILE]
    - Make sure you have provided a destination and source file
    - Please enter a valid file name (do not use any letter outside the ASCII standard).

Where the user provides its own destination and the source files (mostly refered to as listings) are inside the data/listings/ folder.