Embattled

Try the Embattled Arena in your browser!

Embattled is a simple robot simulator that allows users to program robots using an artificial assembly language.

This is a personal project that I worked on in my spare time between February and August of 2025. Going into this project, my knowledge of assembly languages and related concepts was limited primarily to what I had learned in university. I did perform some research into existing instruction sets and terminology to help guide the design of this project, but my goal was less so to perfectly emulate existing real-world systems and more so to demonstrate competency in working with low-level programming languages such as C. As such, there is a decent chance that this project uses certain technical terms or phrases incorrectly. If you come across any such examples, feel free to let me know via a GitHub issue!

The parser and assembler for the language as well as the simulated processor are all written in C. The simulated robot arena is mostly written in C and can be compiled to either a native executable or to web assembly. The web interface, of course, involves some HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

This project uses several open source libraries and tools, including Raylib, Unity Test, Emscripten, and CodeMirror.

More details about the Embattled simulator and how to write programs for Embattled robots can be found on the following GitHub Pages site: https://nwalker1208.github.io/embattled/guide.html

Requirements to build the project locally

• CMake
• Emscripten (for web build)
• Ruby (for regenerating test runners)

Building for desktop

cmake -S . -B ./build
cmake --build ./build

Building for web

emcmake cmake -S . -B ./build -DPLATFORM=Web
cmake --build ./build

Note: At the moment, an issue with Emscripten (or with the way I'm using it) causes backspaces and tabs to be ignored by anything other than the canvas. To fix this, the following code needs to be replaced in the arena.js file that gets built:

if(event.key=="Backspace"||event.key=="Tab"){event.preventDefault()}

Replace the above with:

if(event.key=="Backspace"||event.key=="Tab"){}

(This fix is based on this Stack Overflow answer.)

TODO: Setup GitHub action to run web build on push.

Running tests

cmake --build ./build --target test

Regenerating test runners

TODO: Integrate generate_test_runner into CMake setup.

ruby ./build/_deps/unity-src/auto/generate_test_runner.rb ./processor/tests/process_tests.c ./processor/tests/process_tests_Runner.c --use_param_tests=1
ruby ./build/_deps/unity-src/auto/generate_test_runner.rb ./processor/tests/instruction_tests.c ./processor/tests/instruction_tests_Runner.c --use_param_tests=1