On Atariage, Astharot posted some crazy C code for a chess program, wondering if it could run on the TI. The code looks like it was from a coding contest attempting to squeeze something neat into 2K of source code. Since this looked insane, I figured it would be worth trying it aginst the compiler to see what popped out.

This initially caused compiler crashes, since I did all my testing aginst simple programs. It looks like I missed checking for more complex cases like constant memory expressions (ex: symbol+offset). There's also some lingering problems with fake registers in the 16-bit operations.

I think that since I allow any register to be used with those operations (with the caveat that all 16-bit values must start on an even register), GCC feels free to access the low byte by using the fake registers. Fixing this could be tricky. I don't think I can make a register class like I did for the 8-bit operations, since multiple registers are used for these values. This is also a problem for 32-bit values, so I don't want to use special case code to handle this. If I did that, the machine description file would at least double in size.

I'll have to think about this for a bit.