2.1: The MARS IDE

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This text will use an IDE called the MIPS Assembler and Runtime Simulator (MARS). There are a number of MIPS simulators available, some for educational use, and some for commercial use. However in the opinion of this author, MARS is the easiest to use, and provides the best tools for explaining how MIPS assembly and the MIPS CUP work.

MARS was written by Pete Sanderson and Kenneth Vollmar, and is documented at the sitehttp://courses.missouristate.edu...mars/index.htm, and should be downloaded from this site. MARS is an executable jar file, so you must have the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) installed to run MARS. A link to Java is on the MARS download page, so you should install Java if it is not on your computer.

Instructions for running MARS are on the download page. When it is started, a page which is similar to the following should come up. This will be the starting point for the material in the rest of the chapter.

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