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CS 562

Project 1: Hawknest 6502v Emulator

Released: Thursday, 01/18/2024 Due Date: Friday, 02/09/2024 11:59PM CST

Overview

For this project, you will be completing the implementation of the Hawknest emulator. This emulator will be built around the 6502v processor, a version of the MOS 6502 CPU which I’ve modified slightly for our convenience. The v indicates that this CPU supports paravirtual extensions (namely, a new instruction).

The goals of this project are to:

  • Give you experience working with a fairly large C source tree
  • Help you understand how system emulation works
  • Refresh your understanding of ISAs and the internal operation of CPUs
  • Have fun!

Keep in mind that this project carries many of the imperfections of real-world code. If we encounter bugs or hiccups, we will work through them together.

Part 1: Getting Started

The ideal way to start with this project is using a Vagrant VM. Much like Docker for containers, this allows you to quickly provision virtual machines based on pre-defined configuration files. I’ve set up one of these Vagrantfiles for you so that you don’t have to deal with the headache of different system packages etc. First install Vagrant on your machine as well as a provider, such as VirtualBox or VMWare (paid).

Once you get Vagrant up and running, you will need to download the Hawknest skeleton code. We will be working primarily with git, so make sure you are familiar with the basics. To get the code, run the following in your machine:

git clone https://github.com/HExSA-Lab/hawknest-skeleton.git
cd hawknest-skeleton

This will fetch the handout code from our public git repo. Notice that in that directory there is a Vagrantfile. To use it, just run:

vagrant up

If you’re using the VirtualBox backend (which is probably the easiest), you will probably also have to install the VirtualBox Guest plugins for Vagrant before running vagrant up. You can do so like this:

vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest

Part 2: Building and Running Hawknest

This section will get you to the point where you can build and run the Hawknest emulator.

Prerequisites

You should not have to install any prerequisite packages if you are using Vagrant. One thing to note however, is that the NES emulator mode of Hawknest will only work if you boot up the Vagrant VM with a GUI (this should happen by default, but we’ve seen issues with this before. Come see us if this is the case).

Building the Emulator

Once you have installed the prerequisites, you should be able to build the emulator as follows:

make
build/emu/gcc/debug/mos6502/vmcall.o <- emu/mos6502/vmcall.c
build/emu/gcc/debug/mos6502/mos6502-common.o <- emu/mos6502/mos6502-common.c
build/emu/gcc/debug/mos6502/mos6502.o <- emu/mos6502/mos6502-skeleton.c
build/emu/gcc/debug/nes/io_reg.o <- emu/nes/io_reg.c
build/emu/gcc/debug/nes/nrom.o <- emu/nes/nrom.c
build/emu/gcc/debug/nes/sxrom.o <- emu/nes/sxrom.c
build/emu/gcc/debug/nes/mmc1.o <- emu/nes/mmc1.c
build/emu/gcc/debug/nes/ppu.o <- emu/nes/ppu.c
build/emu/gcc/debug/main.o <- emu/main.c
build/emu/gcc/debug/shell.o <- emu/shell.c
build/emu/gcc/debug/ines.o <- emu/ines.c
build/emu/gcc/debug/rc.o <- emu/rc.c
build/emu/gcc/debug/timekeeper.o <- emu/timekeeper.c
build/emu/gcc/debug/memory.o <- emu/memory.c
build/emu/gcc/debug/membus.o <- emu/membus.c
build/emu/gcc/debug/reset_manager.o <- emu/reset_manager.c
build/emu/gcc/debug/fileio.o <- emu/fileio.c
Linking bin/hawknest-gcc-debug...

You should now have a binary called hawknest-gcc-debug in a newly-created bin/ directory. If you run it without any arguments (or with the -h flag), you will get a help message like so:

bin/hawknest-gcc-debug
Usage: bin/hawknest-gcc-debug [options] <rom-path>
Options:
  --palette or -p <path> : Use the NES palette at <path>
  --cscheme or -c <path> : Use the NES controller scheme at <path>
  --scale   or -s <int>  : Scale NES output by <int>
  --help    or -h        : Print this message
  --version or -V        : Print version information

Probably the only option here you’ll ever have to worry about is the --scale argument, which scales the size of the GUI window for the NES emulator by an integer factor.

Building ROMs (test code)

I’ve supplied you with some simple test programs in the test/ directory in the main source tree: hello.c and primes.c. hello.c tests writing a “Hello World” message to stdout using the paravirtual interface, while primes.c goes a step further to implement an interactive prime-number-checker. These will not work out of the box, and you probably don’t want to focus your effort there. Rather, you’ll want to look at the unit tests (test/*.s) which test small instruction sequences for the 6502 and do not rely on libc to have initialized. The nice part about these tests is that the first instruction you see in the .s file is actually the first instruction to run on the machine (this is not true for the .c files). You can compile all of these tests to Hawknest ROMs by making the tests target in the project root:

make tests
build/test/hello.s <- test/hello.c
build/test/hello.o <- build/test/hello.s
build/lib/intr.s <- lib/intr.c
build/lib/intr.o <- build/lib/intr.s
build/lib/crt0.o <- lib/crt0.s
build/lib/ctype.o <- lib/ctype.s
build/lib/exehdr.o <- lib/exehdr.s
build/lib/mainargs.o <- lib/mainargs.s
build/lib/paravirt.o <- lib/paravirt.s
Linking bin/hawknest.lib...
Linking bin/hello
build/test/primes.s <- test/primes.c
build/test/primes.o <- build/test/primes.s
Linking bin/primes
build/test/00_lda0.o <- test/00_lda0.s
Linking bin/00_lda0
build/test/01_lda1.o <- test/01_lda1.s
Linking bin/01_lda1
build/test/02_lda2.o <- test/02_lda2.s
Linking bin/02_lda2
build/test/03_sta0.o <- test/03_sta0.s
Linking bin/03_sta0
...

You’ll also find a modules.mk file in the test/ directory, which informs the Makefile of the test files to compile. If you want to write your own test, just put the source file in test/ and add it to the modules.mk file; both C (.c) and 6502 assembly (.s) files will work, but .s files will not be linked with the cc65 C runtime system. Behind the scenes, the Makefile invokes cc65, ca65, and ld65, just as in your preliminary project, but using a custom library (bin/hawknest.lib, built from the sources in lib/) and a custom linker script (cfg/hawknest.cfg).

Running Hawknest

Once you have your compiled ROM files, you can run them in Hawknest. For example, we could run the ROM file for the hello.c test like this:

bin/hawknest-gcc-debug bin/hello

Notice that nothing happens: this is because there’s no CPU to run the program! You will implement this, and when you do, you’ll start to see some output here. You can also start Hawknest in an interactive shell, which is useful for debugging purposes:

bin/hawknest-gcc-debug -i bin/hello
$(hawknest-shell)>

Here you can type commands into the interactive shell, but aside from the memory peek, poke, and dump commands, they won’t do anything. The memory commands will work just fine since I’ve already implemented the memory controller, RAM, and ROM subsystems for you. Note that you can also enter the shell for a running ROM, even if you didn’t pass the -i argument to the Hawknest executable: just send a SIGINT (mapped to Ctrl-C in most terminal emulators) to Hawknest to pause the CPU and open the shell. This also applies for stopping continue or step commands early.

While working on your project, you may want to have debugging prints that only appear when you are debugging your CPU. I’ve provided a macro for you to achieve this. The macro is called DEBUG_PRINT. It works similarly to printf, but automatically appends a \n to each printout, and includes the filename and line number of the printout itself. Additionally, it will only produce output when the code is compiled for debugging (which is the default). See the appendix section for additional Hawknest compilation options.

Testing Hawknest

I’ve tried to make things a bit easier on you by providing unit tests for a fairly large subset (but not all) of the ISA. These tests are by no means exhaustive, but they can at least help to guide your development. To run a test, simply use the binary in the bin/ directory, for example:

make tests
bin/hawknest-gcc-debug bin/00_lda0

will test the lda instruction using your emulator implementation. Essentially what all of these unit tests do is execute a few instructions and dump the state of the machine afterwards (using a special instruction). Note that you’ll want to have the initial guts of your emulator in place before this will even work (instruction fetch, decode, execute etc.) because the state dumping relies on the ability of instructions to execute.

I’ve also provided a testing framework for you which will run all of the tests automatically. To use it, run:

make run-unit-tests

If you haven’t implemented anything yet and you run this, it will hang for a bit and you’ll see it time out, producing a failed test. When you get more working, you’ll see more useful output: your machine’s state dump is compared to the state dump of our reference code. If it doesn’t match, the test fails, and the framework will print a diff showing where the machine states differ.

Working with Instrumentation

By default, Hawknest is compiled with embedded runtime instrumentation, namely UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer and AddressSanitizer. The former detects and reports many instances of undefined behavior, and is always non-fatal. This is to say, UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer will never halt a program because it detects an instance of undefined behavior.

AddressSanitizer, on the other hand, is always fatal when it detects errors (mostly invalid memory access). Its checks are useful, but if it becomes a nuisance, you can disable it at build-time like this:

make NO_ASAN=1

On Linux, AddressSanitizer also performs a memory-leak check at program termination. This can be a bit noisy and annoying, as it includes leaks from within external libraries (e.g., SDL), and often fails to track down the origin of a given leak. Unfortunately, there’s no way to disable this at build-time without disabling all of AddressSanitizer, but it can be disabled at execution time by setting the ASAN_OPTIONS environment variable appropriately; in bash-compatible shells that looks like this:

ASAN_OPTIONS=detect_leaks=0 bin/hawknest-gcc-debug <rom_path>

This instrumentation is enabled for the entire Hawknest platform, not just the part you’re working on, so if you see an error report in code you didn’t write, let me know!

Part 3: Implementation

This section will outline some strategies for designing your 6502v with readable code.

Strategy

The skeleton has been set up such that only emu/mos6502/mos6502-skeleton.c should need to be modified to build the CPU. There’s much more detailed information in that file, but the gist is that you’ll need to fill in mos6502_step(...) such that it steps the CPU forward by one instruction. A few helper routines for reading and writing memory are already provided, along with some coarse cycle counting. While you could write the entire CPU implementation inside mos6502_step, we recommended that you add additional functions liberally.

If you’re the kind of person that likes to split things into multiple files, the Makefile is built to accommodate that. If you place an additional source file in emu/mos6502/ and add it to emu/mos6502/modules.mk, it’ll automatically be compiled and linked into Hawknest when you run make. Adding a header file to emu/include/mos6502/ requires no extra steps; anything in emu/include/ is immediately available for inclusion by source files. The Makefile also understands source and header dependencies, so you don’t need to make clean when you edit a header file; just run make like usual.

Suggested Tools

When navigating and working with a large codebase, there are several tools you might want to get familiar with. The first is ctags. This is a utility which creates an index of all the functions and symbols in your source tree, which you can then use to navigate easily within a text editor like vi.

For example, to use ctags for this project, in the Hawknest directory, run the following (you may have to install the ctags package):

ctags -R

This will create a tags file in this directory. To use this in vi or vim, add the following line to your .vimrc file in your home directory:

tags=tags;/

Now, within vi or vim, if you hover over a symbol that you want to see the definition of, e.g. a function, you can navigate to it simply by pressing `ctrl

  • ]. You can go back to where you were before by typing ctrl + t`. Emacs has similar capabilities.

Other tools that might be useful:

  • gdb / lldb : both interactive debuggers for compiled C/C++ programs
  • grep / ack / the_silver_searcher / ripgrep : all tools that search for text strings in a source tree (roughly in order from slowest to fastest). You can also use plugins like Ctrl-p for your editor to do interactive searching/fuzzy finding
  • tmux : useful for having multiple terminal windows open at once
  • tig : command-line graphical interface for git repos (see also lazygit)

Updates

As we progress on this project, I may be making updates to the sections of code that you are not working on (e.g. graphics code, interrupt handling, libraries etc.). If I do make updates, I will ask you to get them from the repo using:

git pull

Because of this, I would advise against adding code to parts of the system outside of emu/mos6502/mos6502.c (and your support files) unless absolutely necessary.

Handin

Once you’re convinced that your 6502 implementation is complete, you will hand in your code using an automated hand-in utility. Simply run:

make handin

to start the process. The handin script will ask you for your information and will use it to submit to my handin server. Note that you can continue to submit until the deadline.

Equal Contribution

Since you’re working in groups, I expect that I’ll see equal contribution among group members when I look at your code. Make liberal use of git commits to make this clear For example, I would commit with:

...add stuff to git index using git add...
git commit --author="Kyle Hale <khale@cs.iit.edu>"

to take ownership of a commit.

Make sure to include a descriptive line such as "Added implementation of JMP instruction."

Appendix 1: Configuring the Build Process

By default, invoking make compiles Hawknest using GCC in a “debug” configuration, but this is not the only way Hawknest can be built. Hawknest can be compiled using either Clang or GCC (with custom executables for either), and has three available compilation “modes”: DEBUG, OPT, and RELEASE. These are set using the COMPILER and MODE variables, so to compile with Clang in OPT mode:

make COMPILER=CLANG MODE=OPT

The build artifacts and final binaries are stored separately for each mode, so they will never conflict. That said, only one COMPILER and MODE can be used for a given make invocation. The name of the final binary reflects these compilation options, so the above invocation would produce bin/hawknest-clang-opt.

Modes

The compilation mode has the most pronounced effect on the behavior and performance of the final executable.

  • DEBUG mode is optimized for debugging. It’s the only mode under which the DEBUG_PRINT macro is enabled, and it compiles Hawknest with a couple pieces of runtime instrumentation (ubsan and asan), which serve to catch common cases of undefined behavior or out-of-bounds memory accesses. DEBUG mode also enables a number of internal sanity checks within the skeleton, so if you manage to trip something outside of mos6502.c, let me know! Finally, DEBUG mode avoids compiler optimizations that would interfere with the use of an interactive debugger like gdb (namely inlining).
  • OPT keeps all the runtime instrumentation and sanity checks of DEBUG mode, but disables DEBUG_PRINT and enables almost all compiler optimizations. This makes it substantially less useful if you like an interactive debugger, but it also often runs substantially faster.
  • RELEASE mode takes the brakes off completely, dropping all runtime instrumentation and enabling link-time optimization. It’s pretty useless for debugging, but it may be required to run NES games at full speed if you have a slower machine.

Compilers

The difference between compilers is not particularly pronounced outside of the diagnostics they produce, but if you prefer using Clang over GCC, you can specify the COMPILER variable:

make COMPILER=CLANG

It also may be the case that your compiler is not available with the usual name; you can override the command invoked for a particular compiler by specifying the corresponding EXEC variable, e.g.

make GCC_EXEC=gcc-8

This works for specifying the CC65 toolchain executables as well, so if they’re not in your PATH, you can specify them manually:

make CC65_EXEC=path/to/cc65 AR65_EXEC=path/to/ar65 CA65_EXEC=path/to/ca65 LD65_EXEC=path/to/ld65

If all the CC65 executables are in the same directory, the above can be shortened to:

make CC65_PREFIX=path/to/cc65/prefix/dir

Appendix 2: Other Potentially-Useful Macros

Internally, Hawknest uses ASSERT and UNREACHABLE macros for sanity checks, and these are exposed to you as well through base.h. While you’re certainly not required to use them, you may find them useful nonetheless.

The ASSERT macro is very similar to the assert macro in the C standard library. It’s used as a function that accepts a single boolean value, e.g.:

ASSERT(x < 7)

If that expression evaluates to a logical false, a message documenting the exact failure is printed to stderr, but execution otherwise continues. This is to say, ASSERT is never fatal.

The UNREACHABLE macro is used to mark points in code that should not be possible to reach during execution (typically default labels in exhaustive switch statements), and is also used like a function (e.g. UNREACHABLE()), despite taking no arguments. When an UNREACHABLE() statement is executed, it has very similar behavior to an assertion failure; it’s also non-fatal.

Both UNREACHABLE and ASSERT are disabled when compiling in RELEASE mode, but otherwise stay active in DEBUG and OPT mode.