DrMIPS

About DrMIPS

DrMIPS is a graphical simulator of the MIPS processor to support computer architecture teaching and learning. It is intuitive, versatile and configurable.

The simulator is available not only for personal computers but also for Android devices, especially tablets.

DrMIPS is open-source and licensed under the GPLv3, so you are free to use, redistribute, modify and improve it (under certain conditions). Feel free to contribute!

You can find the download links below.

Features

• Free and open-source
• Available for both PCs and Android devices
• Can simulate both unicycle and pipeline versions of the MIPS processor
• Datapath displayed graphically
• Step-by-step execution and back step
• Edit registers and data memory during execution
• Performance mode, where the latencies are simulated and the critical path of the processor is shown
• Highly configurable datapaths and instruction sets, and additional ones can be created
• Custom components can be created externally and then used by the simulator at runtime
• Fairly intuitive and easy to use
• Integrated code editor, with syntax highlighting and autocomplete in the PC version
• Values can be displayed either in binary, decimal or hexadecimal
• Light and dark themes
• The panes of the simulator can be displayed either as tabs or windows in the PC version

Screenshots

PC version:

Android version:

Note on supported instructions

DrMIPS simulates and displays the datapath of the processor graphically. Therefore, the simulator only supports the instructions that the datapath itself supports. Since this is mostly an educational simulator, the provided datapaths are very simple, and thus support a rather limited set of instructions. Several instructions like jal, jr, syscalls, floating-point operations and shifts are not supported.

Papers

• Bruno Nova, João C. Ferreira and António Araújo, “Tool to Support Computer Architecture Teaching and Learning”, 1st International Conference of the Portuguese Society for Engineering Education (CISPEE), 2013.
• Bruno Nova, António Araújo and João C. Ferreira, “Ferramenta de Apoio ao Ensino e Aprendizagem de Arquitectura de Computadores”, TICAI 2013-2014: TICs para el Aprendizaje de la Ingeniería, 2014.

Download

Current version: v2.0.4

You can find the changelog and older releases in the project’s Releases page.

Check this page for instructions on how to install and run the simulator.

Be informed of new releases

You can be notified of the release of new versions of the simulator by subscribing to the project’s Releases feed.

Reporting bugs

You can report bugs or ask questions in the project’s Issue tracker.

Documentation

The documentation of the simulator is provided along with the simulator. You can also view it online.

License

DrMIPS - Educational MIPS simulator
Copyright (C) 2013-2015 Bruno Nova

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

You can read the full license text here.