The test sets for variants of the 6502, available at TomHarte/ProcessorTests, are provided in a convenient human-readable JSON format but are quite large wrt. storage requirements. To reduce file size and increase processing speed a script was created that converts the files from JSON to a binary layout format that simplifies processing in languages such as C. The script to perform the conversion and converted binaries of some of the tests are included with this repository.
For example, the binaries for the 6502 directory amounts to 175 MB while the JSON files sum up to around 1 GB.
The following format is repeated for all 10000 tests.
| Bytes | Description | |
|---|---|---|
| 10 | Name | Null terminated string |
| Initial State Block | ||
| 2 | PC | Program Counter |
| 1 | S | Stack Pointer |
| 1 | A | Accumulator |
| 1 | X | X index register |
| 1 | Y | Y index register |
| 1 | P | CPU Flags |
| 1 | n | RAM entry count |
| RAM Entries | ||
| 2 | Addr | RAM entry address |
| 1 | Value | RAM entry value |
| ... | ||
| Final State Block | ||
| 2 | PC | Program Counter |
| 1 | S | Stack Pointer |
| 1 | A | Accumulator |
| 1 | X | X index register |
| 1 | Y | Y index register |
| 1 | P | CPU Flags |
| 1 | n | RAM entry count |
| RAM Entries | ||
| 2 | Addr | RAM entry address |
| 1 | Value | RAM entry value |
| ... | ||
| Cycles Block | ||
| 1 | n | Cycle Entry Count |
| 2 | Addr | Address accessed |
| 1 | Value | Value read or written |
| 1 | Operation | Char 'r' or 'w' for Read or Write |
| ... |
This script converts a JSON test file to a binary version in-place. It will check for
files in the current directory that looks like xx.json where xx is a hexadecimal
value between 00 and FF. It automatically creates an empty bin file if the JSON
is empty (for example CB.json and DB.json in WDC65C02).