SPIM In a LINUX Environment

In my last post I discussed MIPS 32 and the SPIM emulator for running MIPS 32 assembly code on your PC. Today I will briefly talk about how I got SPIM running in a LINUX environment. My earlier post is located at http://inkarlslab.blogspot.com/2011/09/spim-mips-32-bit-simulator.html

The problem I was having yesterday was in compiling SPIM on a Fedora system. I was getting this error message when running the makefile:

make: *** No rule to make target `../CPU/spim.h', needed by `spim.o'. Stop.

All the files were there and apparently in their proper folders, ...

I am still in communication with someone in attempt to get that figured out. The person helping me suggested I try installing the pre-compiled Debian binary. So I downloaded the 32-bit Debian file for QtSPIM from the following link:

SPIM MIPS Simulator Homepage - You can find more information and LINUX versions by going here.
http://spimsimulator.sourceforge.net/

I next unpacked it with the GNOME "File Roller" tool and extracted everything to the "SPIM" directory I had created earlier. Basically that's it. There are two ways to run QtSPIM from this installation.
Suppose you installed your "SPIM" directory in your home directory:

1) On the command line, simply navigate to the "SPIM" directory, then to "/usr", then to "/bin". NOTE that these /usr and /bin directories are NOT the same ones as are in your UNIX file system! Once you are in /bin, type qtspim to start the application, or

2) locate the SPIM/usr/bin folder via the GNOME desktop and click on the QtSPIM executable.



As you can see, QtSPIM is now running on a Fedora system. Having never tried to install a Debian executable on Fedora, I thought this was pretty cool.