CS 273: Midterm Topics

The midterm will be Friday, March 7. Please remember the following:

The exam will be open book/open notes. You may bring any paper reference material you wish — your notes from class, printed copies of my web notes, the lab manual, the HC11 reference manual and guide, any books you want, etc. However, you may not use any electronic aids whatever: no computer, no PDA, no calculator, and (especially!) no cell phone.

Something some students have found useful on occasion (in several different classes, not just this one) has been to generate templates to fill in with the solutions to problems they anticipate being on the exam. This can be very helpful, and is perfectly legitimate.
Bring your own paper.
In order to provide anonymous grading, you need to put your Banner ID on each sheet of paper you turn in. Hint: some students have found it useful in the past to print off ten pages or so of paper with their Banner ID on it already.
Also, you need to start each problem on a new sheet of paper.
Finally, remember that every question has an implicit "why?". If I ask a true/false question and your answer is the single word "true", it's wrong. It's the reasoning I'm looking for here.

Arithmetic

Radix Conversions
- Decimal to other radixes (especially binary and hexadecimal, though others are also fair game)
- Other radixes (again, especially binary and hex, though others are possible) to decimal
- Radix-complement (e.g. 2's complment) representation of negative numbers
Addition in radixes other than 10 (especially binary and hexadecimal, though others are fair game), especially with fixed word sizes.
Condition Codes

Given a short sequence of HC11 assembly code, you should be able to translate it to machine code.
Given a short sequence of HC11 machine code, you should be able to translate it back to assembly code.

Given either assembly or machine code, you should be able to correctly interpret the addressing modes present in the code (so I should be able to give you an instruction like ldaa 13,x, the current value of the IX index register and the contents of some relevant memory locations and you should be able to anticipate the value that will be loaded into the A accumulator).

The addressing modes you should be able to use are Inherent, Immediate, Direct, Extended, and indexed (both X and Y).

You should be able to make use of the instructions we've encountered in class (loads, stores, arithmetic, etc.). You should, in particular, be able to anticipate the behavior of all the conditional branch instructions.

Given a small fragment of an algorithm, you should be able to translate to HC11 assembly code.

I won't be asking anything about the stack — no pushes, no pops, no procedures.

I won't be asking anything about hardware.

Last modified: Wed Mar 5 10:17:35 MST 2008