This post outlines my motivations for extending the Jack operating system.
Hack is a 16-bit computer. It uses the Most Significant Bit (MSB) to denote sign. The remaining 15 bits allow us to uniquely identify 32768 locations in memory. Consequently, we can have a maximum of 32768 Hack instructions in the ROM at a time.
If you try to compile, translate and assemble the game of Pong, you might get an error: "Program too large" because the translation results in an enormous program.
One way to solve this problem is to optimize the toolchain. The course authors provided us with a heavily optimized version of Pong. So, it is evident that with enough effort you can fit a lot into the ROM.
But there must be a limit to how much you can optimize before you run out of memory. Considering larger programs, I felt the operating system portion of the course was a bit lacking.
Working on a more sophisticated operating system would require much more space than we could optimize for. So for now I decided to forego the optimization challenge. Perhaps I'll come back to it later. I moved on to just making the ROM bigger.
However, we can't simply increase the size of the ROM. We also need to increase the size addressable by our registers. You can't access more than 32K unique locations with only 15 bits to spare.
So I changed the architecture from 16-bit to 64-bit. Now, the addressable space for the instruction memory is far more than the 32K we could get with the 15-bit addressing. (The changes in my extension project are incompatible with the original Hack platform.)
2**(16-1) = 32768
2**(64-1) = 9223372036854775808
The A instructions changed in a very simple manner: earlier, we used to have a zero at the MSB and the rest of the bits indicated the value to be put into the A register. The only difference in the 64-bit version is that the size of the address value has increased from 15 bits to 63 bits. The MSB is still zero.
The C instructions also needed to be 64-bit wide. In order to make them wider, I have padded them with zeros to the left. The MSB is hardcoded as 1 to differentiate them from A instructions. New opcodes have been added to support multiplication and division in the CPU.
The CPU emulator has now been designed to consider the entire memory as one contiguous block of memory instead of a ROM and a RAM. This is done so that in the future we can load programs into the memory at runtime and execute them.
Since the two types of memories have been merged, the memory layout has also changed. This change is temporary and will be considered more once the operating system develops further.
DATA: 0x0000 to 0x3fff
SCREEN: 0x4000 to 0x5fff
KEYBOARD: 0x6000
RESERVED: 0x6001 to 0x7fff
CODE: 0x8000 to 0xfffff
DISK: 0x10000 to N/A
With this layout, we have the ability to increase the CODE section as much as we want, since it is at the tail end. Now we can run Pong on the CPU emulator without optimizing the toolchain.
You can find the project source here.