Day 2

Some Instructions

	In the other tutorials, I may have sort of taught the assembly language
and the system workings at the same time. I don't think that would be best this
time around because of the N64 being somewhat more complex. So today, I'll just
describe the registers and the instructions: LI,LA,LW,SW.

Before We Get Started
	You're probably wondering how to run your ROM. Well, Nemu (which you can get from Zophar)
has a pretty good debugger. To run the ROMs that we'll eventually get to making, you need this
Plugin for Nemu to support the bitmap-mode
drawing that we'll be doing (Thanks again to HCS, for pointing me to it).

The R4300i
	The main processor that will be running all of our code for a while is a standard RISC MIPS R4300i,
similar to the one in the PS1 (identical maybe?). It runs at ~93MHz. This thing has even more registers
than the ARM7 in the GBA!! There are 32 registers, I'm still not positive what they all are for, but they are
(in the order listed in Nemu's debugger):

	R0    - Special in that it is always zero, you can't change it.
	AT    - Not entirely sure. Seems to be available to us.
	V0-V1 - Don't know.
	A0-A3 - Are used to pass parameters to subroutines.
	T0-T7 - Temporary data registers, what we should use for regular coding.
	S0-S7 - Called "Save" or "Saved" registers, preserved across subroutine calls??
	T8-T9 - Don't know, maybe same as other 'T' registers.
	K0-K1 - No Clue.
	GP    - No Clue.
	SP    - See AT
	S8    - No Clue.
	RA    - Stores the Return Address for subroutine calls.
	
If someone can email me and fill me in on the ones that I don't know or anything that's wrong that you
ever see, please correct me. (I suppose I'll look at the MIPS tech docs and fill out the rest of the list)

The LI,LA Instructions
	First, the LI instruction. The LI instruction takes 2 operands (parameters):

		li t0, 2  ;  the register on the left will get the number on the right.
	
	simple enough.

	Now, the LA instruction. It also takes 2 operands:

		la t4, LABEL  ; the register on the left will get the address of the label on the right.

	Easy, but there's another use. You can (have to with HCS's assembler) use it the same as LI also,
so like this:

		la t0,2  ; register/left gets number/right

	Wow, that was way easier and shorter to explain than I thought it was going to be... (Did I miss something?)

This Day In Review

	Hopefully tomorrow, we'll take a look at the Video Interface Mem. Registers.
	Nintendo seems to like memory mapping their initialization interfaces...

	Happy Learning!,
		- GbaGuy

Intro - Day 3