SUBLEQ on the Commodore VIC-20

I have created a SUBLEQ Virtual Machine for the Commodore VIC-20. SUBLEQ is a computer architecture that has only one instruction: SUBLEQ. The instruction stands for SUbtract and Branch if Less than or EQual to zero. Code for the VM can be found in the subleq_vic20 repo on GitHub.

SUBLEQ (SUbtract and Branch if Less than or EQual to zero)

The SUBLEQ instruction stands for SUbtract and Branch if Less than or EQual to zero. Because there is only one instruction, only the operands are specified, which consist of 3 memory addresses that are acted on as follows:

SUBLEQ a, b, c
Mem[b] := Mem[b] - Mem[a]
if (Mem[b] ≤ 0) goto c

To find out more about SUBLEQ have a look at my previous article: SUBLEQ - A One Instruction Set Computer (OISC) and its accompanying video.

Example: echo

The following executes a simple SUBLEQ program that loops continuously, accepting a key as input and then displaying it on the screen. It is taken from an example in the subleq_vic20 repo.

            jmp main

; Point the SUBLEQ VM's memory to the SUBLEQ program code
SL_MEM      = prog

; Include the SUBLEQ virtual machine
#include "subleq.a65"

main        ; SL_run starts the VM executing at SL_MEM
            jsr SL_run
            rts

; The SUBLEQ program code
prog        .word -1, -1, 3
            .word 6, 6, 0
            .word 0

This SUBLEQ program would look like the following in my sblasm assembly language, which uses sble to indicate a SUBLEQ instruction.

.equ        IN  -1
.equ        OUT -1

loop:       sble  IN, OUT
            sble  z, z, loop
z:          .word 0

The assembler assumes that if the last argument of the sble instruction isn't supplied then it will be equal to the next location in memory. It doesn't actually store an opcode for the sble instruction as there is only one instruction so only the operands are needed.

Creating a New SUBLEQ Program Loader

This SUBLEQ VM for the Vic uses 16-bit words and to load a new SUBLEQ program into it you can follow these steps.

1. Create a file containing you're SUBLEQ program as a series of numbers. To do this you can use my sblasm assembler. Which also contains a number of examples to try and contains a file to link to 'arch.inc.asq' to provide correct values for the VIC-20.
2. Use the sqtoword.tcl script to convert the output from sblasm to .word entries, using someting like the following for a fizzbuzz program:

   $ tclsh sqtoword.tcl -n 12 fizzbuzz.sq > fizzbuzz.words
   

   The -n 12 indents the lines by 12 spaces to improve text alignment.
3. There are included skeleton files for unexpanded and 8k+ systems. Append the output of sqtoword.tcl to one of them:

   $ cat skeleton_8k.a65 fizzbuzz.words > fizzbuzz.a65
   

4. Assemble the file using XA, making sure that the path to 'subleq.a65' is in the include path:

   $ xa -o fizzbuzz.prg fizzbuzz.a65
   

5. Load the program on your VIC-20 with 8K+ ram expansion and type RUN to start it.

Video Demonstrating the SUBLEQ VM on the VIC-20

You can see the SUBLEQ VM being used on a Commodore VIC-20 in the following video. It shows the process of assembling a 'rock, paper, scissors' game written in SUBLEQ using sblasm, creating a .a65 file, assembling that with XA and then running it on a VIC.