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an assembler and simulator for the original ARM2 processor

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An assembler and simulator for the ARM2 processor

Merlin 4 was an ARM2 computer originally designed in 1988 but built in 1992. There are the tools developed in 1988.

The assembler is arm.c and includes arm2.c (probably a workaround for some length limitation in TurboC). So just compiling the first file should produce a working assembler even without using tcconfig.tc, which is the configuration file for TurboC (their alternative to Makefile). The arm.obj and arm.exe results of compilation are included.

The simulator is simula.c and it must be linked with the result of compiling assembly.c. It presents a user interface very similar to the MS-DOS "debug" command and this reduced assembler is used within the interface while the assembler described above is used as a standalone program.

test.arm is an ARM2 assembly program which tries to exercise all features of the assembler, including things that should be flagged as errors. The result is test.lst.

p8088-2.arm is a simulator for the Intel 8088 processor written in ARM2 assembly. It actually only simulates the fraction of the 8088 that is needed to run sbench.com. The results of assembling this simulator, p8088-2.lst and p8088-2.bin, are included. The idea is that the latter can be used as an input to the ARM2 simulator, and that will in turn read sbench.com and run that in two levels of simulation. The resulting number of clock cycles give an idea of the speed of an emulate 8088 on the actual Merlin 4 hardware. Running the same benchmark natively on a PC allows a comparison, and the result at the time indicated that an emulate 8088 on an 8MHz Merlin 4 would be about as fast as the original 4.77Mhz PC.

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