Program to benchmark Z80 code, especially for Master System
This program needs to run against the .Net Framework. It may work in Mono but it's untested.
Compile some code. End it with a dangling ret to signal when it's done.
$ z80bench test-program.sms
Executed 136170 cycles in 00:00:00.0130497
Now you know how long it took (in CPU cycles; the second time is wall-clock time for the emulation). If you want to specify the load address for your program, append @<address> to the filename; it's implicitly at address 0 if unspecified.
What if you want to add some data?
$ z80bench test-program.sms@0000 data.dat@4000
Executed 136170 cycles in 00:00:00.0131959
The data is inserted at offset 0x4000. In fact, all filenames can be appended with an @address suffix#.
The specific use case for which this was written was testing and measuring depackers to VRAM for Sega 8-bit systems (which map a TMS9918a-like VDP to I/O ports $be and $bf). Pass --vram-compare to compare the VRAM contents:
$ z80bench test-program.sms --vram-compare expected.bin@0000
VRAM comparison: pass
Executed 3121010 cycles in 00:00:00.0951750
The default execution is from address 0 with the stack pointer set to $dff0. You can change these:
$ z80bench test-program.sms@1000 --execute 1000 --stack-pointer c100
Executed 314159 cycles in 00:00:00.02653561
execution will terminate if more than 1,000,000,000 cycles are emulated without the program ending. You can change this limit by passing e.g. --max-cycles 1000000.