The Exspiminator Home Page

Project FAQ

What is "The Exspiminator"?

The Exspiminator is an open source PowerPC CPU simulator, assembler, and disassembler, with associated documentation and tutorials, aimed at facilitating the teaching and learning of modern RISC assembly language programming. It is written in Java for portability.

How far along in development is it?

Recent releases are usable if rather feature poor. Currently there are many areas of the PowerPC which are not yet supported, but then you really don't need the whole instruction set for most programs. Details are included with the release notes made available with each version.

Where can I get the latest version?

The latest releases are made available through the project development page.

Have you got any documentation?

Yes: tutorials on both the software and PowerPC assembly language are now included with the download. You may also like to check out our bibliography.

What is the target platform?

The current target platform is Java 1.2.

Have you thought about doing other Instruction Sets as well?

Yes, we've thought about Alpha, Ultra-Sparc, ARM... these are all modern (live) RISC CPUs it might be cool to have a decent simulator of. We've thought about PA-RISC too but that appears to be dying now that HP got too scared of Intel. Some of us are tempted to do a CISC chip too for comparison... maybe the MC680x0; it's pretty dead but the instruction set was sweet! But we've got to get the PowerPC version working first.

Update: Just checked out the x86-64 instruction set... man, that thing is ugly! Hmmm... wonder if the IA-64 can possibly be any worse?

Update: Looks like Alpha just bought the farm.

Where does the name come from?

The project founder writes:

There is a freely available MIPS simulator, written by James Larus, called SPIM. I have nothing against the core simulator/assembler itself - I used it for a project a while back - in fact it seemed quite good, I never found a bug in the emulation, all the instructions I needed were included (including the pseudo-instructions), and some of the documentation was absolutely first-rate. However, and this goes for both the Windows and X-Window versions, it was DOG UGLY. It STANK... please please could the person who wrote that just use a Macintosh for 5 minutes to see how a GUI is supposed to work. It was horrible. And it crashed quite easily, at least the Windows version did. And I don't think it's maintained anymore. And it no longer supports Macs. And I don't think it's Open Source. And MIPS is dying. So I wanted make a replacement for it. And I couldn't be bothered to spend ages thinking up a cool name. Hence: the Exspiminator.

Last modified: 2001-11-6 by nphillips.