SMIS is a personal project that I hope can serve as a learning tool for those learning about computer architecture and design.

Well, it is short for "Simple Monolength Instruction Set," and it was designed from the ground up to be a pseudo-architecture/assembly language for beginners in hardware/software interface studies.

• It avoids most of the complexity that comes with implementing the x86 instruction set (because of both the number of instructions, and the complex nature of each)
• It avoids the occasionally cryptic names of the ARM instruction set (LDURSB etc.), and provides a larger number of basic instructions so as to avoid the need for highly-verbose code
• All instructions are named in a clear way (I'm looking at you, x86)
• All instructions are the same length (32 bits)
• All opcodes are the same length (8 bits) and are just numbers with no special meaning to any of the individual bits, as in ARM
• The syntax is strict and highly consistent, making it simpler to learn and simpler to interpret others' code

For now the SMIS toolsuite includes an assembler and a disassembler for SMIS ASM, along with a CPU emulator for running your ASM code. If you are unfamiliar with these terms, an assembler takes ASM code and converts it into machine code, a disassembler takes machine code and converts it back to ASM, an an emulator runs the code through a translation layer.

Here's how to start writing in SMIS:

git clone https://code.lthoerner.com/smis && cd smis
cargo build --release
# Add the ./target/release directory to your PATH (this varies between operating systems and shells)
smis --help

You must have Cargo installed on your system in order to build the program.

Once you write your code in a .txt file, you can assemble it into a .bin file by typing smis assemble <your_asm_file.txt> <target_output_file.bin>.

The assembled code can be run through the emulator using smis run <your_executable.bin>.

If you want to disassemble a file, use smis disassemble <your_executable.bin> <target_output_file.txt>.

If you need any help, you may check the documentation PDF at https://code.lthoerner.com/blob/main/Documentation/SMIS.pdf, or contact me through Github.