Game Boy: What constitutes a "half-carry"? - emulation

The Game Boy Z80 CPU has a half-carry flag, and I can't seem to find much information about when to set/clear it.
What I understand so far is that any 8-bit add, subtract, shift, or rotate operation (and maybe others?) set it to bit 4 of the result(?), and the DAA instruction sets/uses this somehow. What I'm not sure is how 16-bit instructions affect it and whether it's affected or not by the use of certain registers.

It's the carry from bit 3 to bit 4, just like the normal carry flag records carry from bit 7. So, e.g. to get the half carry bit in an add:
((a&0xf) + (value&0xf))&0x10
Which gives 0x10 if half carry should be set, 0 otherwise. Getting half carry from the other relevant ops follows naturally - the questions is whether there was carry from the low nibble to the high.
To put things in perspective, the z80 has a 4bit ALU and performs 8bit ops by doing two 4bit ops. So it gets half carry very naturally, as an intermediate result.
DAA is interested in the flag because if half carry is set then two digits that add up to more than 16 were added in the low nibble; that will have correctly produced carry into the upper nibble but will have left the low nibble 6 lower than it should be, since there were six more values between 10, when it should have generated carry, and 16, when it did.

For 16-bit operations, the carry from bit 3 to bit 4 in the register's high byte sets the flag. In other words, bit 11 to bit 12.
(Note the above bits are labeled 0-15, from least to most significant)
See here: http://www.z80.info/z80code.htm
16 bit arithmetic
If you want to add numbers that are more than the 0-255 that can
be stored in the A register, then the HL, IX or IY registers can
be used. Thus LD HL,1000H:LD BC,2000H:ADD HL,BC will give
A CZPSNH BC DE HL IX IY A' CZPSNH' BC' DE' HL' SP
00 000000 2000 0000 3000 0000 0000 00 000000 0000 0000 0000 0000
The flags are set as follows.
C or carry flag 1 if answer >65535 else 0
Z or zero flag not changed
P flag not changed
S or sign flag not changed
N flag 0
H or half carry flag 1 if carry from bit 11 to bit 12 else 0

Since the half-carry flag is one of the most common stumbling blocks for Game Boy emulator makers, I'll take the liberty to post a link to a recent question of mine regarding the subject as an answer:
Game Boy: Half-carry flag and 16-bit instructions (especially opcode 0xE8)
A summary of the above thread (answer by #gekkio):
It depends on the instruction, but the flags are always updated based on the same bit positions if you think in terms of 8-bit values...it just varies whether we're talking about the high or low byte of the 16-bit value. Bit 11 is just bit 3 of the high byte.
ADD SP, e: H from bit 3, C from bit 7 (flags from low byte op)
LD HL, SP+e: H from bit 3, C from bit 7 (flags from low byte op)
ADD HL, rr: H from bit 11, C from bit 15 (flags from high byte op)
INC rr: no flag updates (executed by the 16-bit inc/dec unit)
DEC rr: no flag updates (executed by the 16-bit inc/dec unit)

Related

RISC-V: Do 12-bit immediate logical operations operate on the whole register?

I am trying to write a simulator for a RISC-V CPU and can not find a definitve answer to my question.
Let's say I want to use
ANDI rs1, rd, 0xFFF
with rs1 containing 0xFFFFFFFF and the immediate value being 0xFFF.
Does the ANDI operate on the full register and just fill the remaining 20 bit of the immediate with zeros so the result in rd will be 0x000000FFF?
Or are the higher 20 bits ignored and the result in rd will still be 0xFFFFFFFF?
Same question for XORI and ORI commands.
The Immediate value is sign extended,
12 bit FFF will translate to 32'hFFFFF_FFF for RV32
so the values being AND-ed will be
rs1_data & 0xFFFFF_FFF

Problems with SHA 2 Hashing and Java

I am working on following the SHA-2 cryptographically functions as stated in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-2.
I am examining the lines that say:
begin with the original message of length L bits append a single '1' bit;
append K '0' bits, where K is the minimum number >= 0 such that L + 1 + K + 64 is a multiple of 512
append L as a 64-bit big-endian integer, making the total post-processed length a multiple of 512 bits.
I do not understand the last two lines. If my string is short can its length after adding K '0' bits be 512. How should I implement this in Java code?
First of all, it should be made clear that the "string" that is talked about is not a Java String but a bit string. These algorithms are binary/bit based. The implementation will generally not handle bits but bytes. So there is a translation phase where you should see bytes instead of bits.
SHA-512 is operated on in blocks of 512 bits (SHA-224/256) or 1024 bits (SHA-384/512). So basically you have a 64 or 128 byte buffer that you are filling before operating on it. You could also directly cache the data in 32 bit int fields (SHA-224/256) or 64 bit long fields, as that is the word size that is operated on.
Now the padding is relatively simple procedure. The padding is called bit-padding. As it is used in big-endian mode (SHA-2 fortunately uses this instead of the braindead little endian mode in SHA-3) the padding consists of a single bit set on the highest order bit in a byte, with the rest filled by zero's. That makes for a value of (byte) 0x80 which must be put in the buffer.
If you cannot create this padding because the buffer is full then you will have to process the previous block, and then set the first bit of the now available buffer to (byte) 0x80. In the newer Java you can also use (byte) 0b1_0000000 byte the way, which is more explicit.
Now you simply add zero's until you have 8 to 16 bytes left, again depending on the hash output size used. If there aren't enough bytes then fill till the end, process the block, and re-start filling with zero bytes until you have 8 or 16 bytes left again.
Now finally you have to encode the number of bits in those 8 or 16 bytes you've left. So multiply your input by eight, and make sure you encode those bytes in the same way as you'd expect in Java with the least significant bits as much to the right as possible. You might want to use https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/nio/ByteBuffer.html#putLong-long- for this if you don't want to program it yourself. You may probably forget about anything over 2^56 bytes anyway, so if you have SHA-384/SHA-512 then simply set the first eight bytes to zero.
And that's it, except that you still need to process that last block and then use as many bytes from the left as required for your particular output size.

Converting 64 word (clk/8) to 8x8 word (clk) (Digital Design - Verilog)

I need to make some sort of interface between my PS and PL on Zynq chip. I need block which will accept 64bit long word (at every clk/8) and send 8 by 8bit word at the output (on every clk). So basically I need to divide 64 bit word into 8 x 8bits word. If you have advice's how to do it please share.
Thank you in advance,
Register the 64 bits data at the clock when it is ready. Then do the left/right shift 8 bits (depends on your endian requirement) for the following 7 cycles. Your 8 MSBs/LSBs will be your output data respectively.

x64 opcodes and scaled byte index

I think I'm getting the Mod R/M byte down but I'm still confused by the effective memory address/scaled indexing byte. I'm looking at these sites: http://www.sandpile.org/x86/opc_rm.htm, http://wiki.osdev.org/X86-64_Instruction_Encoding. Can someone encode an example with the destination address being in a register where the SIB is used? Say for example adding an 8-bit register to an address in a 8-bit register with SIB used?
Also when I use the ModR/M byte of 0x05 is that (*) relative to the current instruction pointer? Is it 32 or 64 bits when in 64 bit mode?'
Is the SIB always used with a source or destination address?
A memory address is never in an 8-bit register, but here's an example of using SIB:
add byte [rax + rdx], 1
This is an instance of add rm8, imm8, 80 /0 ib. /0 indicates that the r field in the ModR/M byte is zero. We must use a SIB here but don't need an immediate offset, so we can use 00b for the mod and 100b for the rm, to form 04h for the ModR/M byte (44h and 84h also work, but wastes space encoding a zero-offset). Looking in the SIB table now, there are two registers both with "scale 1", so the base and index are mostly interchangeable (rsp can not be an index, but we're not using it here). So the SIB byte can be 10h or 02h.
Just putting the bytes in a row now:
80 04 10 01
; or
80 04 02 01
Also when I use the ModR/M byte of 0x05 is that (*) relative to the current instruction pointer? Is it 32 or 64 bits when in 64 bit mode?
Yes. You saw the note, I'm sure. So it can be either, depending on whether you used an address size override or not. In every reasonable case, it will be rip + sdword. Using the other form gives you a truncated result, I can't immediately imagine any circumstances under which that makes sense to do (for general lea math sure, but not for pointers). Probably (this is speculation though) that possibility only exists to make the address size override work reasonably uniformly.
Is the SIB always used with a source or destination address?
Depends on what you mean. Certainly, if you have a SIB, it will encode a source or destination (because what else is there?) (you might argue that the SIB that can appear in nop rm encodes nothing because nop has neither sources nor destinations). If you mean "which one does it encode", it can be either one. Looking over all instructions, it can most often appear in a source operand. But obviously there are many cases where it can encode the destination - example: see above. If you mean "is it always used", well no, see that table that you were looking at.

Linux signal masks - what do they mean though?

How can you store 32 signals inside a 16 bit mask?
SigPnd: 0000000000000000
ShdPnd: 0000000000004000
SigBlk: 0000010000017003
SigIgn: 0000000000381000
How do I interpret the SigIgn for example? I read the proc documentation but I don't get how to interpret what the actual bits mean.
Not sure where you got the "32 signals inside a 16 bit mask" information from but it is wrong as far as I know.
Assuming each line is hex then each line is 8 bytes or 64 bits. The lower 4 bytes (32 bits) are standard signals. The upper 32 bits are posix realtime signals. (It's actually a little more convoluted than that - see man (7) signal and SIGRTMAX and SIGRTMIN for the low down.)
So in the SigIgn mask you asked about everything is off but a couple of things in the lower 3 bytes: 38 10 00. In the lowest order byte, 00, no signals are ignored. In the next byte, the hex 10 converts to 00010000 in binary. So the 5th bit in that byte is on. Likewise hex 38 converts to binary 00111000. Putting the 3 bytes together as a string of binary we get:
001110000001000000000000
So counting from the right we can see that bits 13 20 21 22 are ON and therefore ignored. If you go back to man (7) signal you can see the table for the signal values. The values are broken down by architecture so, assuming you are on a ix86 machine, the signal values represent that SIGPIPE, SIGTSTP, SIGTTIN and SIGTTOU signals are being ignored.

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