ARM Core Wars
Do you remember the old programming game, Corewar? Admittedly, it was a little before my time, but I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of writing competitive, pure programs. After doing a little research on the original Corewar, I decided to implement my own, but with a twist: instead of reusing the assembly-like language from the original or making up my own, I decided to use the ARM instruction set as the basis for my game. After a few weeks of hacking on a friend’s ARM emulator, I made a working prototype for a new Corewar.
As it turns out, ARM is a great instruction set for this purpose, having fixed size instructions and PC relative addressing. My design makes use of almost the entire ARM7TDMI instruction set, including THUMB, with a few synchronization and esoteric instructions omitted.
Hopefully I will have a polished version for public consumption some time in the near future (though I can never be sure how far out personal projects will end up).
Tags: arm, development