n2t

n2t copied to clipboard

#+TITLE: 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 [[https://github.com/jhallen/cpm][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 [[http://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/z80pack/][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

• [[https://github.com/jhallen/cpm][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.