Locations, locations, locations

In the last month I was trying to hang on my sanity while we were on house-hunting in Auckland (nuff' said). Wasn't easy and apparently it is not even close to be finished. :/

Anyway, I managed to do some work on the E-UAE JIT in the stolen moments.

In the update for this month you will find these little eggs:

  • Implementation of ADD.x Dy,mem, ADD.x mem,Dy, ADD.x #imm,mem, ADDA.x mem,Ay, ADDQ.x #imm,mem,
    AND.x mem,Dy, AND.x reg,mem, ANDI.x #imm,mem,
    BCLR.B #imm,mem, BCHG.B #imm,mem, BCHG.L #imm,reg, BSET.B #imm,mem,
    NEG.x Dy,
    OR.x Dy,mem, OR.x mem,Dy, ORI.x #imm,mem,
    UNLK.x Ay instructions.
  • Fixed unintended modification of the source register for some register to memory operations.
     
  • Memory read helper tweaked to use R3 register as the result register, no need to copy the data back-and-forth. (More optimal compiled code.)
     
  • Memory reader and writer helper function cleaned up to be more independent from caller data.

It might seem a bit random how I choose which instructions are implemented, but there is always a recurring theme. Right now this theme was the memory access. As you can see most of these instructions are manipulating the memory, which was a little bit scary earlier but I came around creating some functions which can be reused for (almost) all memory accessing instructions.
The tricky part was accessing the memory while the allocated temporary registers remain accessible somehow. With a minor workaround for saving and occasionally reloading the temporary registers after the memory access this is solved now.

I am not too happy about how the whole register mapping works, unfortunately there are some limitations of the C language which makes it complicated to come up with a more robust solution. So, right now the whole thing is just a bit hacky and wacky. Maybe in the future it would need an overhaul.

I get the question most of the times: how many instructions are left to implement. There is an easy way to find out the progress: check the table68k_comp descriptor file.
Each (to be) supported instructions for the JIT compiling is already listed there, next to the name of the instruction there is a number: 0 or 1. The 1 means it is already done, 0 remains to be implemented.
The instructions which will not be supported by the JIT compiling (so the interpretive will handle these) are not listed in this file.

So, all we need to do is counting the instructions which are already supported and what remains to be done. The current state without the FPU instructions is: 181 is done out of 388 (~46% is done).
As you can see there is more work to do, but it is really hard to tell how long does it take. What I can see is that the time I have to spend with each instruction is shorter and shorter, due to the infrastructure which had to be built first but now it is mostly done. Also some instructions are very similar, I can simply reuse parts of an already finished instruction.

We are not there yet, but the donkey is not that stubborn anymore. Giddy-up buddy!