n2t

Subprojects for nand2tetris course

Description

In this project I put my solutions for Nand To Tetris. I use the PLMX compiler.

For this repository I use the jhallen’s CP/M environment because it is required that the subprojects be buildable from command line with Makefiles and executable from command line. So I can’t just use an emulator and make and test inside. The executable files must be usable from linux. That’s exacly what jhallen’s cpm does. It runs an emulator, but reads from and writes to the current directory.

Unfortunately it supports only one directory (mapped to A: drive). So in order to compile I must have the compiler and the project in the same directory. This is something that I think should be avoid, so I created bash script to copy the compiler files from plmx.zip to the project directory and to remove them when they are not needed.

I had to modify the plmx binaries in order to rename files with the plm extension. PLMX used this extension for overlay files. But I prefer to use the plm extension for PL/M source code files. I am not the only one who does it, for example many CP/M source files heve the plm extension and PL/M examples from z80pack also have this extension. I used emacs in order to find the name of .PLM files and I replaced them with .DAT. Not sure whether it’s the best choice for the extension. Perhaps I should have chosen .OVR.

Requirements

• Linux
• GNU coreutils (comm, sort)
• sed
• zipinfo
• github.com/jhallen/cpm with binaries in $PATH

Usage

• Clone the repository
• cd to a subproject that you would like to test or to run.
• There should be a Makefile, which you can use running make.

And so, the most compete version of the subpackage is compiled. The command should also create linux executable scripts which you can run to test the compiled program.

• You can remove compiled files with make clean.

Subprojects

hackasm

The assembler for the nand2tetris CPU.

In two versions:

• basasm: without variables nor symbols
• hackasm: with variables and symbols

The assembler reads a Hack assembly file and produces a text file containing a string representation of two binary bytes per line. It means that the output file contains characters 0 and 1 and CRLF between lines. And each line is 16 characters (representing 2 bytes).

The input file has the extension asm and the ouput is hck because CP/M doesn’t like extensions with more than 3 characters.

VM Translator

Creates assembly code from .vm files.

JackCompiler

Written in Java, generates .vm files from Jack files and projects.

JackOS

Written in Jack, implements the basic functionality for Jack.