MakerLisp COR24 — Assembly Emulator

Note: Active emulator development has moved to sw-embed/sw-cor24-emulator. This repository is maintained for the live demo and historical reference.

A browser-based educational emulator for the MakerLisp COR24 (C-Oriented RISC, 24-bit) architecture. Written in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly.

Live Demo

Assembler Tab

C Tab

Rust Tab

CLI Pipeline Demos

Features

• Interactive Assembly Editor — Write and edit COR24 assembly code
• Step-by-Step Execution — Debug your code instruction by instruction
• Multi-Region Memory Viewer — Program, Stack, and I/O regions with change heatmaps
• CLI Runner (cor24-run) — Assemble and run programs, load pre-assembled binaries, interactive terminal mode
• CLI Debugger (cor24-dbg) — GDB-like command-line debugger with breakpoints, UART, and LED/button I/O
• LGO File Loader — Load programs assembled with the reference as24 toolchain
• Built-in Examples — Learn from pre-loaded example programs
• Challenges — Test your assembly skills with programming challenges
• ISA Reference — Instruction set documentation and memory map

COR24 Architecture

COR24 is a 24-bit RISC soft CPU for Lattice MachXO FPGAs, designed for embedded systems education. 32 operations encode into 211 instruction forms (1, 2, or 4 bytes).

• 3 General-Purpose Registers: r0, r1, r2 (24-bit)
• 5 Special-Purpose Registers:
  • r3 = fp (frame pointer)
  • r4 = sp (stack pointer, init 0xFEEC00)
  • r5 = z (always zero; usable only in compare instructions)
  • r6 = iv (interrupt vector)
  • r7 = ir (interrupt return address)
• Single Condition Flag: C (set by compare instructions)
• 16 MB Address Space: 1 MB SRAM + 3 KB EBR (stack) + memory-mapped I/O
• Active-Low LED: Write 0 to FF0000 bit 0 = LED ON, write 1 = LED OFF (matches hardware)
• Active-Low Switch: Read FF0000 bit 0: 0 = pressed, 1 = released
• Variable-Length Instructions: 1, 2, or 4 bytes

Supported Instructions

Category	Instructions
Arithmetic	add, sub, mul
Logic	and, or, xor
Shifts	shl, sra, srl
Compare	ceq, cls, clu
Branch	bra, brf, brt
Jump	jmp, jal
Load	la, lc, lcu, lb, lbu, lw
Store	sb, sw
Stack	push, pop
Move	mov, sxt, zxt

Examples & Demos

This project has two sets of examples, matching the two tabs in the web UI:

• Assembler Examples — 11 hand-written COR24 assembly programs. Available in the web UI's Assembler tab (click Examples → pick one → Assemble → Run) and via cor24-dbg on the command line (see scripts/demo-cli-*.sh).

• Rust Pipeline Demos — 12 Rust programs compiled through the Rust → MSP430 → COR24 cross-compilation pipeline. Available in the web UI's Rust tab (pick example → Compile → Translate → Assemble → Run) and via CLI scripts in rust-to-cor24/demos/ (see run-demo.sh, per-demo run.sh, generate-all.sh).

# Assembler example via CLI debugger
scripts/demo-cli-hello-world.sh

# Rust pipeline demo via CLI
rust-to-cor24/demos/run-demo.sh demo_add
rust-to-cor24/demos/run-demo.sh demo_echo_v2 --uart-input 'hello!'

For an overview of all the binaries and how they fit together, see docs/eli5.md.

cor24-run CLI

cor24-run assembles .s files, runs them on the emulator, and supports loading pre-assembled binaries. See cor24-run -h for all options or docs/cli-tools.md for full documentation.

# Assemble and run
cor24-run --run prog.s --dump --speed 0

# Interactive terminal mode (stdin/stdout bridged to UART)
cor24-run --run repl.s --terminal --echo --speed 0

# Assemble to binary at a base address
cor24-run --assemble lib.s lib.bin lib.lst --base-addr 0x010000

# Load pre-assembled binaries (no assembly step)
cor24-run --load-binary pvm.bin@0 --load-binary hello.p24@0x010000 \
          --patch 0x09D7=0x010000 --entry 0 --terminal

# Set button S2 state for testing
cor24-run --run button_test.s --switch on --dump

Building

Prerequisites

• Rust (1.75+)
• Trunk (cargo install trunk)
• wasm32-unknown-unknown target (rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown)

Development

# Serve locally with hot reload (port 7401)
./serve.sh

# Open http://localhost:7401/cor24-rs/

Production Build

# Build optimized WASM to pages/
./build.sh --clean

Project Structure

cor24-rs/
├── src/
│   ├── cpu/           # CPU emulator core
│   │   ├── decode_rom.rs  # Instruction decode ROM (from hardware)
│   │   ├── encode.rs      # Instruction encoding tables
│   │   ├── executor.rs    # Instruction execution engine
│   │   ├── instruction.rs # Opcode definitions
│   │   └── state.rs       # CPU state (registers, memory regions, I/O)
│   ├── emulator.rs    # EmulatorCore — shared controller for CLI and Web
│   ├── assembler.rs   # Two-pass assembler
│   ├── loader.rs      # LGO file loader (as24 output format)
│   ├── challenge.rs   # Challenge definitions
│   ├── wasm.rs        # WASM bindings (WasmCpu wraps EmulatorCore)
│   └── app.rs         # Yew web application
├── rust-to-cor24/     # CLI runner (cor24-run) + MSP430→COR24 translator
├── cli/               # CLI debugger (cor24-dbg)
├── components/        # Reusable Yew UI components
├── tests/programs/    # Assembly test programs (.s files)
├── scripts/           # Demo and build scripts
├── styles/            # CSS stylesheets
└── pages/             # Built WASM output (GitHub Pages)

Testing

cargo test

License

MIT License - see LICENSE

Acknowledgments

• COR24 architecture by MakerLisp — designed for embedded systems education on Lattice MachXO FPGAs
• Decode ROM extracted from original hardware Verilog
• Reference assembler/linker (as24/longlgo) by MakerLisp

References

• MakerLisp - COR24 Homepage
• COR24 Soft CPU for FPGA
• COR24 Test Board