The SLOOP (slüp)
was a set of components designed to allow implementation of a modern version of
the 6502, the processor used in one of the early Atari game stations.
The SLOOP
defined a RISC ISA and a set of on-the-fly translations from
the original 6502 CISC ISA into SLOOP instructions.
Students built SLOOP machines that successfully ran most original 6502
games.
Extensions to SMOK provided
specific help with SLOOP models.
In particular,
SMOK provided graphical output simulating the game station display,
and passed through input events to the SLOOP machine.
Additionally, when used with SLOOP,
SMOK ran a software 6502 simulator
and compared the behavior of the student's SLOOP
machine against the simulator on a per-memory-operation basis.
This feature simplified debugging of SLOOP
machine organizations by raising an error
at the earliest cycle at which the student's machine is known to deviate from
correct behavior.
The SLOOP was used in
an offering of CSE378 taught by Ben Dugan.
This publication
gives an overview of the use of the SLOOP project and
SMOK in that class.
While the SLOOP
was the original motivation for SMOK,
it has been superceded
by
Cebollita, and, alas,
the SLOOP is no longer.
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