be0387eed0
The sim-hardware configure option allows builders to select a set of device models to enable. But this seems like unnecessary overkill: the existence of individual device models doesn't affect performance at all as they are only enabled at runtime if the config uses them, and individually these are all <5KB a piece. Stripping off a total of ~50KB from a ~1MB binary doesn't seem useful, and it's extremely unlikely anyone will ever bother. So let's simplify the configure/make logic by turning sim-hardware into a boolean option like many of the other sim options. Any ports that have unique device models will declare them in their Makefile instead of at configure time. This will allow us to (eventually) unify the setting into the common dir.
= OVERVIEW = The Synacor Challenge is a fun programming exercise with a number of puzzles built into it. You can find more details about it here: https://challenge.synacor.com/ The first puzzle is writing an interpreter for their custom ISA. This is a simulator for that custom CPU. The CPU is quite basic: it's 16-bit with only 8 registers and a limited set of instructions. This means the port will never grow new features. See README.arch-spec for more details. Implementing it here ends up being quite useful: it acts as a simple constrained "real world" example for people who want to implement a new simulator for their own architecture. We demonstrate all the basic fundamentals (registers, memory, branches, and tracing) that all ports should have.