Assembly Language: Class Project 1

At this point in the class, you hopefully know enough assembly language to actually use it to solve problems, so I'd like you to use it to solve a problem you're interested in.

From the syllabus:

Each project is 15% of your course grade, so it should have some pretty good stuff.  Conversely, the total end-to-end time for the project is only a few weeks, so keep it manageable!

Project Deliverables

    October 2014      

Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa  
          1  2  3  4  
 5  6  7  8  9 10 11  
12 13 14 15 16 17 18  <- project topic due
19 20 21 22 23 24 25  <- code rough draft due
26 27 28 29 30 31       <- presentations
2   3    4   5        <- final draft code due

On October 15, I'd like you to describe in class your project topic.  We do these out loud so everybody can hear each other's ideas, making it easier to form group projects if you'd like to do so.

On October 22 I'd like your rough draft code, which should work and do most of what you want, but not necessarily do everything you want to do, or be fully polished or tuned. 

The presentation is a very short, 3-minute presentation in class on October 27 & 29.   Your presentation should clearly describe WHO you are, WHAT you did, HOW you did it, and WHY you chose to do it that way.  Bring a laptop to project your code, demo, slides, and/or figures, or email me your presentation materials the day before, if you'd like to present from my laptop.

The final code should be fully debugged, polished, tuned, commented, and include at least a short README explaining what it is, and what its results mean.  You'll be graded on a combination of ambition, correctness, completeness, and comments/style.  Style and clean code count!  Due Wednesday, November 5.  (This is scheduled after the presentation, so you can follow any suggestions or ideas you get during the presentation.)

Typical grade breakdown: project grade = 30% rough draft + 20% presentation + 50% final code

Example Project Topics

• Write or modify a program to do "something useful" in assembly language.  Useful things include:
• Interact with the user in classic CS 201 style.  This means lots of string processing, like gets and puts.
• Do anything interesting in assembly, like the bit rotate or bit-scan forward instructions.  Add a nice callable C++ interface.
• Switch between user-level threads.
• Create a PC Boot Block, which is actually just up to 512 bytes of 16-bit mode x86 machine code at the start of a (usually emulated) disk, that the (usually emulated) CPU loads and runs on startup.  Your boot block can do anything it wants to the machine at that point--it's effectively a tiny operating system! 
• Take off from any homework problem you like, and do something interesting with it.  
• Start with any interesting C++ program.  Disassemble it.  Figure out and add comments to each line of the disassembly--every time I do this, I learn things I didn't know I didn't know!
• Design a new CPU instruction set, and write a little CPU emulator to execute that instruction set.  This is easier than it sounds!
• Embrace and extend some assembly-related code from the net--but be sure to cite your sources, so I can grade you on what you've added, not what you started from.
• Write or modify a program to do something high-performance in assembly language.

Or pick your own topic!