Thurs, 15th Oct 2015, 19:11 test cases for lab 1, AND additional office hours

My students,

As we approach the home stretch for the first progamming lab,
the following should help:

Thing 1: Additional office hours.  We are adding an extra 12 hours of
office hours this weekend, 6 on Saturday and 6 on Sunday.  They will
be posted on the web site before the weekend.

Thing 2: The test cases for lab1.  I have gotten a couple of emails
bemoaning the tedium associated with generating test cases.  The following
should make life easier:

The easiest way to write test cases is to write them in the LC3Edit
program. Usually the HEX format is easiest to work with, but you can also
write your test cases in binary if you are more comfortable with that. The
first line of the file is the starting address of the data and all the
remaining lines are the data that you want to be placed in memory.

For example if I wanted to stick the ascii codes for a,b, and c in memory
locations, starting at address x7000, I could write a file, testcase.hex,
that looked like this:

7000
0061
0062
0063

Press the button with the word HEX on it to convert this text into a format
the simulator can understand, testcase.obj. Now open the simulator and use
the load program option to load testcase.obj. The simulator should jump to
memory location x7000 and you should be able to see your constants sitting
in memory. Now you can load your program and begin testing.

Note: the test case I have written above is problematic for our purposes
for two reasons.  What are they?

1. The test case will be loaded into x7000.  Where do we want it?
2. To make this a good test case, we need the contents of one more location.

Hope this makes your work less tedious.

Good luck finishing the program by Sunday night.



Yale Patt