iainmacpherson / 8086-sim

8086 Sim

A simulation of a basic 8086 processor written in Go, implementing a subset of the processor's features.

Written for fun and practice learning go.

Current state of the project

Currently, this project is only capable of decoding and outputting a disassembly of a binary containing a limited subset of the instructions supported by the 8086, and it does not support execution of any.

Supported Instructions

Instruction	Decoding	Disassembly	Execution	Description
MOV	y	y	n	Transfer a byte or word from source to destination.
PUSH	n	n	n	Decrements the stack pointer and transfers a word from the source to the stack.

Current TODO list

• implement disassembly for push
  • disambiguate properly between operations with the same first byte
    • need to implement a peak function in DataStream

Future Plans

This is very much in a proof of concept phase at the moment. I may eventually have the time to implement support for the full 8086 instruction set but for now I am happy to have written a framework that would make it relatively simple (if time consuming) to do so.

Requirements

• Go
• Make

Building

1. Clone this repository
2. Run make in the root directory to build the project.
3. The binary is in the bin directory

Running the project

There are a few sample 8086 binaries in the data folder along with their source code. They were assembled with NASM.

To run the binary you will need to provide a path to the binary to run. For example you could run this from the root directory:

./bin/8086-sim -disassemble -in data/many_mov

To access the help run the binary with the argument -h.

Credits

• Project inspired by C. Muratori's Performance Aware Programming Course. However, all code and techniques are my own.