Summary

The previous chapter introduced TC1, a Python-based computer simulator that could be used to develop and test instruction set architectures. In this chapter, we explored aspects of simulator design in more depth.

We looked at how you can create new instructions and add them to TC1’s instruction set. Advanced instructions that perform a lot of special-purpose computation were once the province of the classic CISC processor, such as the Motorola 68K family. Then, with the rise of the RISC architecture and its stress on simplicity and single-cycle instructions, the CISC processor seemed about to go out of fashion. However, many modern computers have incorporated complex instructions for special applications such as data encoding, image processing, and AI applications.

We looked a little more deeply at how you can check the input of a simulator and ensure that errors in data and instructions can be detected.

We also looked at various topics in Python programming...