qtarmsim 1.0.5

Easy to use graphical ARM simulator

QtARMSim is an easy to use graphical ARM simulator. It provides an easy to use multiplatform ARM emulation environment that has been designed for Computer Architecture introductory courses.

The ARMSim ARM simulator, Copyright (c) 2014-20 by Germán Fabregat, is bundled with QtARMSim. It can be found on the armsim/ subdirectory of the QtARMSim installation path.

1. Installing QtARMSim

For installing QtARMSim, you need to also install its dependencies.

QtARMSim depends on:

• Python 3

• Qt for Python (PySide6)

• ARMSim

ARMSim, which is bundled with QtARMSim, requires:

• Ruby

• GNU GCC Arm toolchain

The following sections explain how to install QtARMSim and its dependencies on GNU/Linux, Windows, and macOS.

1.1 Installing QtARMSim on GNU/Linux

Most GNU/Linux distributions provide packages for Python3 and Ruby, which therefore can be installed via the system’s package manager. The required portion of the GNU GCC Arm toolchain is bundled with QtARMSim (so this part does not have to be manually installed). Finally, QtARMSim (and PySide6) can be installed using pip3.

Example: Installation on Ubuntu

First, install the next required packages:

$ sudo apt install ruby
$ sudo gem install shell e2mmap sync
$ sudo apt install pipx
$ pipx ensurepath

Then, for a single-user installation:

$ pipx install qtarmsim

Or for a system-wide installation:

$ sudo pipx ensurepath --global
$ sudo pipx install --global qtarmsim

Note: If the --global option is not recognized, consult pipx documentation or ask ChatGPT for a workaround. This drawback can be solved with something similar to:

$ sudo pipx install pipx  # Installs a newer version of pipx on the root home
$ sudo apt remove pipx    # Removes the older system pipx
$ sudo bash
# ~/.local/share/pipx/venvs/pipx/bn/pipx install pipx --global
# ~/.local/share/pipx/venvs/pipx/bn/pipx ensurepath --global
# exit
$ sudo pipx install --global qtarmsim  # The newer version should support --global

Example: Installation on Gentoo

$ sudo emerge -av pip ruby
$ sudo gem install shell e2mmap sync
$ pip3 install --user qtarmsim
$ post_install_qtarmsim

1.2 Installing QtARMSim on Windows

Follow these steps to install QtARMSim on Windows:

1. Download a 64-bit Python installer from the Windows official Python website (or from the MS Windows store). Make sure to select “Add python.exe to PATH” during installation. Select the 3.12 Python version (which is supported by PySide6).

2. Download a 64-bit Ruby installer (with Devkit) from the Ruby Installer website. Ensure “Add Ruby executables to your PATH” is selected.

3. Open a console (cmd or PowerShell) and run the following commands:

   gem install shell e2mmap sync   # to install the required Ruby modules
   pip3 install qtarmsim           # to install qtarmsim
   post_install_qtarmsim           # to create start menu entry and shortcuts

1.3 Installing QtARMSim on macOS

Follow these steps to install QtARMSim on macOS:

1. Install Python 3 from the official Python website (or from the macOS store). Make sure you install a python version supported by PySide6 (check the python compatibility matrix in Qt for Python).

2. Open a terminal and run:

   $ sudo -H pip3 install qtarmsim
   $ sudo post_install_qtarmsim

After installation, you can run QtARMSim by typing qtarmsim in a new terminal session.

Note: If you encounter an error stating that PySide6 is not available for your macOS version, you can install PySide6 via MacPorts and then install QtARMSim without Python dependencies:

$ sudo port install py311-pyside6   # Replace 'py311' with your Python version
$ sudo -H pip3 install --no-deps qtarmsim
$ sudo post_install_qtarmsim

1.4 Optional: installing the GNU GCC Arm Toolchain

Starting with QtARMSim version 0.3.1, the required components of the GNU GCC Arm toolchain are bundled with QtARMSim. Manual installation is only needed if the bundled toolchain does not work properly.

On GNU/Linux

You can install the GNU GCC Arm toolchain via your distribution’s package manager or by downloading it from the GNU Arm Embedded Toolchain Downloads page.

Example (Ubuntu):

$ sudo apt install gcc-arm-linux-gnueabi

Example (Gentoo):

# emerge -av crossdev
# echo "PORTDIR_OVERLAY=/usr/local/portage" >> /etc/portage/make.conf
# crossdev --target arm --ov-output /usr/local/portage

On Windows and macOS

Download and install the appropriate package from the GNU Arm Embedded Toolchain Downloads page.

Once a new GNU GCC Arm toolchain has been installed, you must configure the ARMSim Gcc Compiler option in QtARMSim preferences to point to the new arm-none-eabi-gcc executable.

2. Running QtARMSim

To run QtARMSim, execute the qtarmsim command or launch it from the applications menu (on GNU/Linux, under the Education:Science category).

3. Upgrading QtARMSim

To upgrade QtARMSim to its latest version, use the following commands:

• On GNU/Linux:

  Depending or your method of installation (pix):

  $ sudo pipx upgrade qtarmsim

  or (pip):

  .. code-block:: shell-session

  $ sudo pip3 install –upgrade qtarmsim

• On Windows:

  pip3 install --upgrade qtarmsim

• On macOS:

  $ sudo -H pip3 install --upgrade qtarmsim

4. Uninstalling QtARMSim

To uninstall QtARMSim, run:

• On GNU/Linux:

  $ sudo pipx uninstall qtarmsim

  or

  $ sudo pipx uninstall qtarmsim

• On Windows:

  pip3 uninstall qtarmsim

• On macOS:

  $ sudo -H pip3 uninstall qtarmsim

5. Known installation issues

If QtARMSim does not start correctly, try running qtarmsim from a terminal to inspect any error messages.

Common issues and solutions:

• Issue: PySide6 installation fails

  Solution:

  PySide6 installation problems usually are related to which python versions it supports. This can be checked in https://pypi.org/project/PySide6/ (requires filed under Meta section) or checking the python compatibility matrix in Qt for Python. If you are using a version of Python not supported by the last version of PySide6, install a supported python version.

  Another option is to check if your operating system provides its own PySide6 packages. If this is the case, you can install them and then install QtARMSim without pulling its dependencies:

  # sudo pip3 install --no-deps qtarmsim

• Issue: On Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, the PySide2 5.14 package does not display some icons or SVGs properly.

  Solution:

  $ sudo pip3 install pyside2

• Issue: The following error appears when launching QtARMSim:

  qt.qpa.plugin: Could not load the Qt platform plugin "xcb" in ""
  even though it was found.

  Solution:

  $ sudo apt install libxcb-xinerama0

• Issue: Since Ruby installer version 2.5, the shell, e2mmap, and sync modules are no longer bundled.

  Solution: Manually install these modules using the gem command as shown in the Windows installation instructions.

• Issue: PySide2 versions 5.12.0 and 5.12.1 introduced regressions that prevent QtARMSim from working properly.

  Solution: Upgrade to PySide2 version 5.12.2 or later.

License

Copyright 2014-25 Sergio Barrachina Mir <[e-mail]>

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

3rd party software acknowledgments

The next 3rd party software is used and distributed with QtARMSim.

ARMSim: an ARM simulator, copyright Germán Fabregat Llueca, licensed under the GPLv3+. Included under the qtarmsim/armsim directory.

GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection, copyright the Free Software Foundation, Inc, licensed under the GPLv3, with the addition under section 7 of an exception described in the “GCC Runtime Library Exception, version 3.1” (see <https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/license.html>). Binary versions targeting the ARM EABI are included under the qtarmsim/gcc-arm directory.

Qfplib: an ARM Cortex-M0 floating-point library in 1 kbyte, copyright Mark Owen, licensed under the GPLv2. Source code included under the 3rdparty/ directory. This part of the code is only available under the GPLv2 license.

AlphaSmart 3000 font, designed by Colonel Sanders. Included under the src/3rdparty/ directory.

Changelog

1.0.6 (2025-06-23)

• Removed pyqtdarktheme dependency (it only supports python versions lower than 3.12).

• Edited the package documentation.

1.0.4 (2025-06-20)

• Reorganized the project to use pyproject.toml and the hatchling builder.

• Updated the KDE breeze icons.

• Using pyqtdarktheme to improve the QtARMSim aesthetics.

1.0.1 (2023-11-28)

• Fixed the way an ARM macOS is detected.

1.0.0 (2023-11-03)

• Migrated from PySide2 to PySide6.

• Updated the bundled GNU GCC (cross) compilers and added the win64 and ARM macOS versions.

• Added the font increase and decrease functionality to the registers and memory panels.

0.5.5 (2021-10-28)

• Fixed bug with macOS BigSur and PySide2.

0.5.4 (2021-05-27)

• Fixed incompatibility with Ruby 3.0.

0.5.3 (2020-11-06)

• Updated the installation instructions.

• A newer 64 bit GNU GCC Arm toolchain for macOS has been included.

0.5.2 (2020-06-20)

• Updated the installation instructions.

• Updated post installation hook for linux.

• Post installation code reorganized to allow post_install to be installed as a script.

0.5.1 (2020-06-13)

• Reformatted post_install code and added a hook for linux.

• Changed default QtARMSim icon by the SVG version.

• Moved post_install.py script outside of qtarmsim module to avoid its dependency on PySide2 (under certain circumstances, post-install is called before the PySide2 dependency is installed).

0.5.0 (2020-05-25)

• Visualization improvements, especially on the trace ribbon (left area of the simulator).

• The registers at the register dock are now highlighted when a register is highlighted in the editor or in the simulator.

• Added Full Screen mode.

• Added new Compact layout. Hides everything but the registers and memory docks (which are stacked at the left) and the Edit/Simulation widget (which takes the rest of the window).

• The ARMSim path and GNU compiler path are tested on initialization. If they are no longer valid (usually due to a system python update), they are replaced by their default values.

• Improved the QtARMSim installation and integration on GNU/Linux, Windows and macOS. On GNU/Linux, the KDE expected mime type for assembler editors has been added. On Windows, a menu entry and a desktop shortcut are now created. On macOS, the qtarmsim script is automatically copied on /opt/local/bin/.

• Added a simulator output panel that displays the stdout of ARMSim (available only in debug mode).

• Fixed a bug in ARMSim due to GCC trimming the lines of the LST file at a fixed number of bytes, which under certain circumstances could lead to split a multi byte UTF-8 character and provoke an exception.

0.4.19 (2020-05-05)

• Fixed bug: ‘QPaintDevice: Cannot destroy paint device that is being painted’.

• Updated ARMSim version.

0.4.18 (2020-05-05)

• Fixed bug: assigning a PIPE to armsim stdout prevented the Windows version to work properly.

0.4.17 (2020-05-04)

• Updated installation instructions for Windows systems.

0.4.16 (2019-11-08)

• Added the Show/Hide tabs and spaces functionality (on the editor contextual menu).

• Saved files are forced to end with a new line (to avoid misleading the gcc compiler if the last line ended with a TAB).

• Added zoom in and zoom out via CTRL++ and CTRL+- (CTRL+wheel already was there).

• Tab width is now correctly computed.

0.4.15 (2019-07-15)

• Added the printf subroutine to the ARMSim firmware.

0.4.12 (2019-04-24)

• PySide2 5.12.2 has corrected the previously changed signature of QAbstractItemModel.createIndex(). The INSTALL documentation has been modified to no longer force the installation of PySide2 5.11.

0.4.11 (2019-01-21)

• PySide2 5.12 has changed the signature of QAbstractItemModel.createIndex(), as it seems that they are going to do a regression, the INSTALL documentation has been changed to force the installation of the previous 5.11.2 version of PySide2.

0.4.10 (2018-11-20)

• Added an scroll area inside the LCD Display dock widget (so that the LCD width does not force the whole simulator width).

• Changed LCD font to “AlphaSmart 3000” by Colonel Sanders.

• Added a new example of floating point operations usage, triangle.s, under ‘File > Examples > Floating point’ menu.

0.4.9 (2018-10-16)

• Changed LCD font to “1 Digit” by David Chung.

• Fixed bug that prevented code to be resized.

0.4.8 (2018-10-8)

• Properly acknowledging Qfplib by Mark Owen.

0.4.7 (2018-7-27)

• Added memory contents tooltips.

• Added new example, LCD/ascii, and revised previous ones.

• Changed the way the monospaced font is selected.

0.4.4 (2018-7-25)

• Migrated to Qt for Python (PySide2).

• Speeded up the filling of the simulator data.

• Added examples as a File menu entry.

• Added ARMSim tabs to separate the source code of the different ROMs.

• Added Qfplib (floating point library) API documentation to the help.

• Added UseLabels ARMSim option.

• Memory dock: first RAM is expanded by default and whenever a memory entry is modified it scrolls to its position.

0.3.16 (2018-1-17)

• Corrected typo on the restructured text format of the changelog documentation.

0.3.15 (2018-1-17)

• Added support in the simulator to showing jump labels instead of their addresses.

• Corrected errata on Qfp library acknowledgments.

• Removed legacy code from GlSpim.

0.3.14 (2017-11-08)

• Added SVG icon support explicitly: the toolbar icons now will be also shown on Windows.

• ARMSyntaxHighlighter rules are now generated only the first time.

• ARMSim: - Added support for floating point operations including Qfplib: an ARM Cortex-M0 floating-point library in 1 kbyte. - Corrected minor bug: .global declared labels generated a linking error. - Corrected minor bug: negative displacements on ‘bl’ instructions where incorrectly displayed.

0.3.13 (2017-11-02)

• Added preliminary printing support.

0.3.12 (2017-04-21)

• Changed the icon set to the KDE Breeze one.

• LCD Display not rescaling correctly on some desktop environments fixed.

• LCD display can now be zoomed with CTRL+mouse wheel.

• Editors and panels now honor the system default point size.

• Now the menu bar is displayed on the system menu bar on Mac OS X.

0.3.11 (2016-10-30)

• The Edit menu actions have been implemented.

• Settings values are now automatically stripped to avoid errors due to misplaced spaces.

• ARMSim: updated firmware to correct a bug on sdivide subroutine.

0.3.10 (2016-09-19)

• ARMSim: updated firmware to provide a signed division subroutine.

0.3.8 (2016-09-19)

• Bug corrected: waiting spinner occluded File and Edit menus.

0.3.7 (2016-09-18)

• Added firmware ROM that provides, among others, functions to display strings and numbers on the LCD display. The new memory organization consists of two ROM blocks and two RAM blocks. The first ROM block is filled with the assembled user code. The second ROM, with the firmware machine code. The first RAM can be used to store the user program data. The second RAM is used by the LCD display.

• The graphical interface now uses a thread to retrieve the memory contents and the disassembled code from the two ROM blocks.

• The regular expressions used to highlight the code on the editors have been optimized to increase the highlighting process speed.

0.3.5 (2016-09-12)

• Improved the Mac OS X compatibility and added installation instructions for this platform.

• Changed the minimum size of the code editor container to accommodate lower resolution screens.

• ARMSim: (i) LSL result is now bounded to 32 bits; (ii) command redirection is performed explicitly to avoid an error on newer Windows versions; and (iii) the method used to compare whether memory blocks where not defined has been changed to avoid errors on Ruby with version >= 2.3.

0.3.4 (2016-01-21)

• Added a memory dump dock widget that allows to see and edit the memory at byte level. It also shows the ASCII equivalent of each byte.

• Added a LCD display dock widget that provides a simple output system. It has a size of 32x6 and each character is mapped to a memory position starting a 0x20070000.

0.3.3 (2015-11-28)

• Added a visual indication of which instructions have already been executed on the left margin of the ARMSim panel.

• Added automatic scroll on simulation mode in order to keep the next line that is going to be executed visible.

• Improved the automatic selection of a mono spaced font (previously selected font used ligatures).

• Fixed an error on the Preferences Dialog which prevented to select the ARMSim directory and the Gcc ARM command line using the corresponding directory/file selector dialogs.

• ARMSim: Fixed the simulation of shift instructions: only the 8 least significant bits are now used to obtain the shift amount.

• ARMSim.: Fixed the behavior when memory outside the current memory map is accessed: each wrong access now raises a memory access error.

• Bundled a reduced set of the GNU compiler toolchain. To reduce the package size, only those files actually required to assemble an assembly source code have been included.

0.3.0 (2015-06-09)

• Migrated from PyQt to PySide to allow a simpler installation of QtARMSim.

• Developed a new source code editor based on QPlainTextEdit, though removing the prior QScintilla dependency, which allows a simpler installation of QtARMSim.

• Improved the ARM Assembler syntax highlighting.

0.2.7 (2014-11-05)

• Last revision of the first functional QtARMSim implementation. This implementation was used on the first semester of an introductory course on Computer Architecture at Jaume I University. This is the last version of that implementation, which used PyQt and QScintilla.