Online Emulator

This is the online version of the QNICE emulator. It uses WebAssembly and WebGL, so if you are not seeing a QMON> prompt and a blinking cursor above, then your web browser probably does not support these technologies. You might want to use the native offline version in this case.

First Steps

• Enter f and then r and then type in qbin/mandel.out and press ENTER. You should see a text-mode rendition of the famous Mandelbrot set.
• Press CURSOR UP or CURSOR DOWN to scroll up/down.
• Press h to see the available commands.
• Enter m and then s and then type in A000 and then A010 to see the disassembly of the first bunch of machine instructions of the Mandelbrot program.
• The emulator can mount FAT32 images, for example SD card images as QNICE-FPGA can also handle FAT32 formatted SD cards. The minimum of any FAT32 image is 32MB. This online version of the emulator mounts a 32 MB disk image that contains the folders c/test_programs, demos, qbin and test_programs.
• For having a look at the Mandelbrot source code, start the mini shell using f and then r and then type in qbin/shell.out. After that, enter cd demos and then cat mandel.asm into the shell and then use CURSOR UP and CURSOR DOWN to scroll and read the source code.

More Programs to Try

• If you are still running the mini shell, then leave it by entering exit.
• Change the directory to the qbin folder by entering f then c and then qbin.
• List the directory by entering f and then d.
• Wolfram’s Cellular Automata: use f and r to run wolfram.out
• Sierpinski Fractal Generator: run sierpinski.out
• Abandoned Farmhouse Adventure: run adventure.out
• Tic-Tac-Toe: run ttt2.out
• Moveable and Zoomable Mandelbrot: run mandel_zoom.out

Playing Q-TRIS

• Q-TRIS is a Tetris clone and the first game ever developed for QNICE-FPGA The rules of the game are very close to the “official” Tetris rules as they can be found on Wikia.
• If you switched to the qbin folder as described above, then now enter fand then r and then q-tris.out to start the game. If you are somewhere else in the file system, you can enter f and then r and then /qbin/q-tris.out (including the leading forward slash /) to start the game.
• Run the game for having a realistic baseline and while it runs, adjust the emulation speed to match 13.0 MIPS as close as possible. This provides you with the same gaming experience as you would have on the QNICE-FPGA hardware.
• The current high score can be found here (Link).

Adjusting the Emulation Speed

• The emulation speed depends on how many QNICE CPU instructions the emulator is performing per frame and on the amount of frames per second that your hardware is able to draw while calculating the before-mentioned amount of instructions.
• Press ALT+f to toggle between showing and hiding the MIPS (million instructions per second) and the FPS (frames per second). The numbers are displayed at the top-right corner of the screen and the display stays on, until toggled again.
• ALT+v to see, how many instructions per frame are currently being executed. The amount is displayed in a window in the middle of the screen, which disappears after about three seconds. The speed change windows, that are described in the following bullet points, are disappearing after about three seconds after the last keypress as well.
• ALT+SHIFT+n: decrease instructions per frame (IPF) by 100,000
• ALT+n: decrease IPS by 2,500
• ALT+SHIFT+m: increase IPF by 100,000
• ALT+m: increase IPF by 2,500

Caveats

Currently the emulator is hardcoded to the German keyboard layout. If you are not able to enter a forward slash / when trying to enter qbin/mandel.out after having pressed f and then r as described above, then just switch into the right directory first, and then run a file: Press f and c to change into a directory, for example into qbin. And then run the file with f and then r and then enter mandel.out.

You currently cannot copy from or paste to the emulator window. Use the native offline version, if you need for example to work with “memory load” (press m and then l) for loading your own .out files.

The speed of the QNICE-FPGA hardware running at 50 MHz is 13.0 MIPS (million instructions per second). The emulator may run too fast in your web browser. You need to adjust the emulation speed to match the hardware manually.