Liyang on the intartubes

Tetris for MIPS / SPIM

You SPIM me right round, baby
right round like a record, baby
Right round round round

If these lyrics are conjuring up unpleasant images in your head, you really need to disconnect yourself from the internets.

I know, you’re going to dig this.

For the second semester of the 2006/2007 academic year, I was stationed at the University of Nottingham Nottingham, England’s other other campus: the University of Nottingham Ningbo, China, where I taught the G51CSA course.

Partly to make a point to the students that the SPIM simulator / assembler is capable of much more than just the trivial programs they’ve been asked to write, but mostly to alleviate boredom, I wrote this implementation of tetris during a handful of afternoon lab ses­sions.

Feel free to improve on it. Idea include:

• Implement the next piece display; the logic is already there.
• Use a timer interrupt rather than looping for more consistent timing.
• Use keyboard interrupts instead of polling.