ESCAPE is an interactive portable simulation environment of a 32 bit pipelined and microprogrammed architecture based on Hennessy and Patterson's DLX. The main goal is to present students with an easy-to-understand custom-made architecture that allows them to become familiar with the basic concepts of computer architecture, without being overwhelmed by the complexity of realistic microprocessor architectures.
ESCAPE was developed by Peter Verplaetse and Jan Van Campenhout at the Electronics and Information Systems (ELIS) department at Ghent University (http://www.elis.ugent.be). It was ported from Delphi to the Free Pascal Compiler and Lazarus by Jonas Maebe at the same department.
ESCAPE was first presented at the Workshop on Computer Architecture Education (WCAE) held in June 1998 in cojunction with ISCA-25 at Barcelona, Spain. A brief paper on this topic also appeared in a special issue on Computer Architecture Education of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Computer Architecture (TCCA) Newsletter.
- Free Pascal Compiler 2.6.4 or newer: http://www.freepascal.org/download.var
- Lazarus IDE 1.4.2 or newer: http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org
ESCAPE is known to work on Windows, (Mac) OS X (PowerPC and i386) and Linux (i386 and x86-64). Other platforms supported by both the Free Pascal Compiler and Lazarus should also work.
- Install the EscapeComponents package: add EscapeComponents/escapecomponents.lpk according to the instructions at http://wiki.freepascal.org/Install_Packages#Adding_new_packages
- Build Escape in Lazarus (Run -> Build)
On Linux, the Qt widgetset may work better than the gtk2 widgetset. Note that if you did not install Lazarus using the package manager of your distribution, you will have to also download and install the libQt4Pas library from http://users.pandora.be/Jan.Van.hijfte/qtforfpc/fpcqt4.html
- Paper about ESCAPE can be downloaded from http://users.elis.ugent.be/escape/download.html#papers
- Sample exercises can be found at http://users.elis.ugent.be/escape/exercises.html