tma-16

A 16-bit Virtual Machine and its toolchain, written for educational purposes by Dante Falzone, Romain Pesche, and Lance McDonald.

Assembler: v1.9

Instruction set: v1.3

The TMA-16 is a 16-bit Von Neumann machine, with a very limited instruction set (only 32 instructions!). It was created both as a teaching tool, to help people visualize computation at the lowest level, as well as a learning tool, to help the authors have a better grasp of low-level programming and a slightly easier Assembly language to practice with than x86 Assembly.

You'll want to read tma-16-rs/README.txt for a list of options to pass to it.

This implementation, written in Rust, can run TMA-16 executables almost as fast as native machine code, but if you'd like to be able to see what's going on you can slow down the execution. See tma-16-rs/README.txt for more details.

Building the machine (on *nix) is easy, provided your Rust toolchain is up-to-date:

1. cd tma-16-rs

2. cargo build --release

And that's it! The path to the executable is tma-16-rs/target/release/tma-16-rs. You can make an alias for it or move it into /usr/bin for greater ease of use.

To use this virtual machine, do the following (assuming that tma-16-rs is in /usr/bin or is aliased):

1. Use the .asm files in the directory /programs/ (or write your own programs in TMA-16 Assembly!)

2. Assemble them with python3 tma_16_assembler.py [file].asm. Pass the option -h or --hexdump on the command line to see a hexdump of your assembled program.

3. Run them with tma-16-rs {file}.tmx [options] (".tmx" is the extension for TMA-16 executables).

If you would like to make tweaks to the TMA-16, or write a new implementation of it, try running some of the provided programs (especially test.asm) to make sure that whatever you're doing still conforms to the specification.

The TMA-16 has been partially ported to MinGW, but the MinGW implementation is very buggy.