I was recently searching through my hard drive looking for examples that might highlight my love of low level programming, and I present here one such project which is a good example of this.

THUMB is an instruction set that was added to some ARM processors as a way to reduce code size, which is advantageous as ARM typically finds use in very constrained devices.  The processor can switch between two operating modes at the request of the program, switching from decoding ARM instructions to smaller THUMB instructions.

I found THUMB particularly interesting since the instruction set is clean and simple and it might make a nice basis for a virtual machine to execute programs written in it.  My idea was to use programs written in C and compile them to THUMB and then execute them in a virtual machine, the entire process serving as a powerfully scripting system for games.

Ultimately, I switched to a MIPS processor as my basis for this project, but I still got as far as making a THUMB disassembler.  I should point out that this was the first disassembler I ever wrote so it marks a large mile stone for me.  Since then I have made a very nice MIPS disassembler using much of what I learned on this project.  The code for the THUMB disassembler can be found here:

thumb_disassm.cpp

To test a disassembler there needs to be something to feed it.  For that purpose, I compiled a small program in GCC targeted for the THUMB instruction set.  The program is listed below, and is just a nonsense program designed only to be valid so as to generate some instructions:

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