Octo

Octo Assembly Language

Octo programs are a series of tokens separated by whitespace. Some tokens represent Chip8 instructions and some tokens are directives which instruct Octo to do some special action as the program is compiled. The : directive, followed by a name (which cannot contain spaces) defines a label. A label represents a memory address- a location in your program. You must define at least one label called main which serves as the entrypoint to your program.

Using a label by itself will perform a subroutine call to the address the label represents. Alternatively, you can be more explicit by using :call followed by an address or name. A semicolon (;) is another way to write return, which returns from a subroutine. The # directive is a single-line comment; it ignores the rest of the current line. Numbers can be written using 0x or 0b prefixes to indicate hexadecimal or binary encodings, respectively.

Numeric constants can be defined with the :const directive followed by a name and then a value, which may be a number, another constant or a (non forward-declared) label. Registers may be given named aliases with :alias followed by a name and then a register. The i register may not be given an alias, but v registers can be given as many aliases as desired. Here are some examples of constants and aliases:

:alias x v0
:alias CARRY_FLAG vF
:const iterations 16
:const sprite-height 9

Chip8 has 16 general-purpose 8-bit registers named v0 to vF. vF is the “flag” register”, and some operations will modify it as a side effect. i is the memory index register and is used when reading and writing memory via load, save and bcd, and also provides the address of the graphics data drawn by sprite. Sprites are drawn by XORing their pixels with the contents of the screen. The screen is 64 pixels wide and 32 pixels tall, and sprites drawn off the edge of the display will wrap around. Drawing a sprite sets vF to 0, or to 1 if drawing the sprite toggles any pixels which were previously on. For a more detailed description of the behavior of Chip8 instructions consult Mastering Chip8.

In the following descriptions, vx and vy refer to some register name (v0-vF) and n refers to some number. The Chip8 keypad is represented on your keyboard as follows:

Chip8 Key   Keyboard
---------   ---------
 1 2 3 C     1 2 3 4
 4 5 6 D     q w e r
 7 8 9 E     a s d f
 A 0 B F     z x c v

For convenience, Octo predefines constants beginning with OCTO_KEY_ for each keyboard key with the value of the corresponding Chip8 key. For example, OCTO_KEY_W has a value of 5.

Statements

The load and save instructions postincrement i by x+1. For example, load v3 will add 4 to i after loading 4 bytes of memory into the first 4 v registers.

Assignments

The various chip8 copy/fetch/arithmetic opcodes have been abstracted to mostly fit into a consistent <dest-reg> <operator> <source> format. For some instructions, <source> can have several forms.

Control Flow

The Chip8 conditional opcodes are all conditional skips, so Octo control structures have been designed to map cleanly to this approach. The following conditional expressions can be used with if or while:

if...then conditionally executes a single statement. For example,

if v0 != 5 then v1 += 2

Octo also provides pseudo-ops for using <, >, <= and >= to compare two registers or a register with a constant:

if v1 >  v2  then v3 := 5
if v1 <= 0xA then v3 := 7

These are implemented by using the subtraction instructions -= and =- and querying vf. Note that these pseudo-ops produce 3 chip8 instructions each and should be avoided when the simpler direct comparisons are suitable.

If you wish to conditionally execute a group of statements, you can use if...begin...end instead of if...then. Optionally you may include an else clause.

if v0 > 5 begin
	v1 := random 0xFF
	if v1 == 5 begin
		v2 := v1
		v3 := v1
	else
		delay := v1
	end
end

if...begin...else...end will not always be the fastest or most compact way to express your desired conditions. Consider rearranging your logic, using jump tables with jump0 or factoring the bodies of conditional clauses into subroutines if they are reused elsewhere. if...begin...end requires more instructions than a plain if...then, so prefer the latter when practical.

loop...again is an unconditional infinite loop. loop marks the address of the start of the loop and produces no code, while again compiles a jump instruction based on the address provided by loop. Since again is itself a statement, we can use an if...then at the end of a loop to skip over the backwards jump and efficiently break out of the loop. The following loop will execute 5 times:

v0 := 0
loop
	# do something...
	v0 += 1
	if v0 != 5 then
again

The other way to break out of a loop is while. while creates a conditional skip around a forward jump. These forward jumps are resolved by again to point to the address immediately outside their loop. while will thus exit the current loop if its condition is not true. You can have as many while statements in a loop as you want. Here is an example of while which is similar to the previous except for when the condition is checked.

v0 := 0
loop
	v0 += 1
	while v0 != 5
	# do something...
again

loop...again constructs may be nested as desired and will behave as expected, but note that simply chaining together if...then statements (as in if v0 == 0 then if v1 == 1 then v2 := 4) does not elicit useful behavior.

Self Modifying Code

Sometimes you may wish to have the 12-bit address represented by a label available in v registers. Octo provides a command called :unpack for this purpose which expands into a pair of register assignment opcodes. It takes a nybble (0-15 numeric literal or constant) followed by a label as arguments. The lower 8 bits of the address will be stored in v1 and the upper 4 bits of the address will be bitwise ORed with the specified nybble shifted left 4 bits and stored in v0. If the label cucumber represented the address 0x582, the following sets of statements would be identical in meaning:

v0 := 0xA5
v1 := 0x82

:unpack 0xA cucumber

This operation makes it possible to write self-modifying code without hardcoding addresses as numeric literals. If you wish to unpack addresses into registers other than v0 and v1 you can define aliases called unpack-hi or unpack-lo, respectively.

Another type of self-modifying code that comes up frequently is overwriting the second half of an instruction, particularly instructions like vX := NN whose second byte is an immediate operand. This requires a label at the second byte of an instruction, which can be achieved with :next:

: init  :next target va := 2 ;

...

i := target
v0 := 5
save v0
init # va will be set to 5 instead of 2.

You can also specify an address at which subsequent instructions should be compiled by using :org followed by an address. The use of this operative is very brittle, so it should be avoided unless absolutely necessary.

Metaprogramming

Sometimes your code will contain repetitive patterns that don’t make sense to break out into subroutines. Perhaps they differ by the registers they operate upon, or for performance reasons you need to avoid the overhead of a call and a return. The :macro command is the solution. It takes a name, followed by names for 0 or more arguments, then a {, a sequence of arbitrary Octo statements and finally a terminal }. When you reference the name of a macro, you must provide tokens corresponding to each argument, and then Octo will inline the contents of the macro with any instances of the argument names substituted by the input tokens. Here’s a trivial use and definition example:

:macro swap A B {
	vf := A
	A  := B
	B  := vf
}

...

swap v0 v1
swap v2 v1

This generates code equivalent to the following:

vf := v0
v0 := v1
v1 := vf
vf := v2
v2 := v1
v1 := vf

Macros must be defined before expansion, and macro definitions may not be nested, but macro invocations may appear within macro definitions.

Sometimes there is an arithmetic relationship between constants in your program. Rather than computing them by hand, the :calc command allows you to perform calculations at compile time. It takes a name, followed by a {, a sequence of numbers, constant references, binary operators, unary operators or parentheses, and finally a terminal }. The name is assigned to the result of evaluating the expression within curly braces. The following operators are available:

unary:  - ~ ! sin cos tan exp log abs sqrt sign ceil floor @
binary: - + * / % & | ^ << >> pow min max < <= == != >= >

The unary operator @ looks up an address in the compiled ROM at the time of evaluation. Logical operators return 0 or 1 to indicate false or true, respectively. Additionally, the mathematical constants E and PI are usable, and the constant HERE indicates the address immediately following the end of the compiled ROM at the time of evaluation.

Note that as with all Octo commands, the tokens of a :calc expression must be separated by whitespace. Bitwise operations are performed as if arguments were 32-bit signed integers, and otherwise they are treated as floating-point. When referenced, calculated constants are truncated to integegral values as appropriate. Order of evaluation is strictly right-to-left unless overridden by parentheses. The following expressions are equivalent:

:calc foo { 2 * 3 + baz }
:calc foo { 2 * ( 3 + baz ) }

When using :calc and :macro together, it is often useful to write the contents of some constant to the ROM; this can be done with :byte:

:macro with-complement X {
	:calc Y { 0xFF & ~ X }
	:byte X
	:byte Y
}

For convenience and brevity, if :byte is immediately followed by { the expression is computed as with :calc and compiled as a byte, without defining an intermediate constant. The :org and :call operatives can also accept a constant expression, truncated to a 16-bit or 12-bit address, respectively.

SuperChip

SuperChip or SCHIP is a set of extended Chip8 instructions. Octo can emulate these instructions and will indicate if any such instructions are used in an assembled program. The SuperChip instructions are as follows:

Flag registers are persisted using browser local storage, so provided no applications blow them away intentionally they can be used to store information between play sessions such as high score information or progress.

Finally, drawing a sprite with height 0 (which would otherwise do nothing) is used by the SuperChip to draw a large 16x16 sprite. The sprite data itself is stored as 16 pairs of bytes representing each row.

XO-Chip

Beyond SuperChip, Octo provides a set of unique extended instructions called XO-Chip. These instructions provide a 4-color display, improved scrolling functionality, a flexible audio generator, expanded ram and instructions which make memory manipulation more convenient.

For more details, consult the XO-Chip specification in Octo’s documentation directory. At time of writing Octo is the only Chip8 interpreter which supports these instructions, but authors are encouraged to provide them in their own interpreters.

Debugging

Octo provides basic debugging facilities for Chip8 programs. While a program is running, pressing the “i” key will interrupt execution and display the contents of the v registers, i and the program counter. Any register aliases and (guessed) labels will be indicated next to the raw register contents. You can click on registers in this view to cycle through displaying their contents in binary, decimal, or hexadecimal.

When interrupted, pressing “i” again or clicking the “continue” icon will resume execution, while pressing “o” will single-step through the program. The “u” key will attempt to step out (execute until the current subroutine returns) and the “l” key will attempt to step over (execute the contents of any subroutines until they return to the current level).

Pressing the “p” key will interrupt execution and display a profiler, indicating a best guess at the time spent in subroutines within your program so far. The profiler shows the top 20 results in a table, and you can also copy and paste a more detailed dump of profiling information for further analysis offline.

Breakpoints can also be placed in source code by using the command :breakpoint followed by a name- the name will be shown when the breakpoint is encountered so that multiple breakpoints can be readily distinguished. :breakpoint is an out-of-band debugging facility and inserting a breakpoint into your program will not add any code or modify any Chip8 registers.

The command :monitor, followed by a base address and length, will register a memory monitor. While your program runs, monitors will be updated continuously to reflect the contents of memory. Pressing “m” will toggle the memory monitor on and off. Like :breakpoint, :monitor is out-of-band and generates no instructions.

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