I am studying Assembly programming in general, so I’ve decided to try and implement a “virtual microprocessor” in software, which has registers, flags and RAM to work with, implemented with variables and arrays. But since I want to simulate only the most basic behavior of any microprocessor, I want to create an assembly language that has only the essential instructions, only those instructions without which it couldn’t be useful. I mean, there are assembly languages that can do multiplication and swapping register values, etc, but these operations are not basic because you can implement them using simpler instructions. I don’t want to implement instructions like those.
I can imagine a couple of instructions which (I believe) must always be present in any assembly language, such as MOV to move bytes around and JP to send the instruction pointer to another address.
Could you suggest a set of the most basic and essential assembly instructions? Thanks!
Well, this is a very broad subject. I suppose you need to get familiar with Random Access Machine. I’m not an expert, but it’s difficult to tell which instructions should be supported by this very basic microprocessor. For example: Subtraction and multiplication may be simulated by Addition operation. Multiplication is possible if microprocessor supports jumps and conditional instructions and subtraction is possible by adding negative number.