2-ZonsWith the help of some excellent feedback from @roelh I am reworking the instruction set. I have decided to move away from the load / store syntax and am moving to a 68K style move instruction to help avoid duplicating instructions. Each two operand instruction will be in the form of INSTR source,destination. I am building a database in Access to help me come up with my list of instruction. I've created a table of Operations :
MOV
ADD
SUB
INC
DEC
PUS
POP
RES
RTI
RTS
JMP
JCA
JZE
JMI
TST
OR
AND
XOR
XNR
NOT
JSR
CMP
And a table of Operands:
A B X Y AB XY SP PC # ## . $ $## SR +SP -SP +XY +AB
(symbols are placeholders for Immediate, Absolute, Indirect and Immediate Indirect.)
The tables have info like the width of each operand, the number of operands for the operations. and notes. Just combining all these without using the same operand twice results in almost 8,000 instructions. I am working on using query's to help me build groups of instructions. This will help me prioritize modes for different registers. I want to give high functionality to the stack. I will be using AB as the data focused register and XY as the pointer focused one. I want to have the rules for the instructions be logical so you can easily remember which registers are capable of what. My first version of instructions had limitations on pointer style programming. With only 2 pointer registers (besides SP and PC) being able to do operations on memory will be important I think.
I will look at coming up with an easy way of auto publishing my Instruction info from the database somehow. I know office 365 have features similar to Google docs so It should be possible. Just haven't played around with it yet.
I'm already thinking that If this goes well (I build it in a reasonable amount of time). I might try taking a crack at a 16 bit CPU. I love the idea of having enough bits in the instruction code to have 3 bits for source register 3 bits for destination, 4 or 5 bits for operation etc. would be really cool. But I am getting way ahead of myself. Lets just get this one done. (reminding myself to watch the feature creep).
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Excellent article @Yann Guidon / YGDES . The 6809 is my favorite 8 bit processor, and the processor I first learned assembly on. Although the processor of my all time favorite computer (C-64) has a special place in my heart. The article is very helpful. The 6809 has an excellent instruction set. In order to achieve this it reads a second instruction byte for some instructions. I had thought about doing this in my CPU but I am trying to keep it simple. I am not trying to make the best 8 bit CPU out there, just make an 8 bit CPU that works, and meet my own standards of functionality.
My goal is to have the instruction set make sense, and fit in 256 instructions.
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Keep it simple and orthogonal :-)
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That might be difficult. As Indicated above combining all my operations (18 that take operands) with all registers and addressing modes comes out to thousands of possible operations. I would love it to be orthogonal but I only have 256 Instructions. Intel didn't even make their processors orthogonal when they went to 386 and 32 bits. I will have a hard time doing it in 8 bits.
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you might find this interesting
byte_6809_articles.pdf
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