Meta assembler and emulator for the Intel 8086 microprocessor

Abstract

The thesis describes a Universal meta cross assembler and an emulator for the Intel 8086 microprocessor. The utility is designed to be used as an instructional tool to teach assembly language programming to students. One implementation is available to allow students to run Intel 8086 programs on the university's vax mainframe, so that students can test their programs at their convenience. This setup also results in low operating costs with no additional equipment requirements. Several options are provided in the emulator to debug the 8086 assembly language programs composed by students. The assembler, besides generating Intel 8086 machine code, has the capability to generate machine code for a number of microprocessors or microcontrollers. The machine code file generated by the assembler is the input to the emulator. Both the assembler and the emulator are completely portable and can be recompiled to run on any system with a standard C compiler.