Boot Process

If we wish to HLE the MCPX, then there are certain things that can be ignored, for example, getting the CPU to 32 bit protected mode and enabling caching.

Xcodes

The xcode interpreter is common through both versions of the MCPX ROM. The high level interpretation of the MCPX ROM might look like this:

void xcode_interpreter() {
    int run_xcodes = 1;
    uint32_t eip = 0xff000080; // Not really EIP. This is just a pointer to the next xcode
    uint32_t result, scratch = 0;
    while (run_xcodes) {
        opcode    = get_memory_byte(eip);
        operand_1 = get_memory_dword(eip+1);
        operand_2 = get_memory_dword(eip+5);

        if (opcode == 0x07) {
            opcode    = operand_1;
            operand_1 = operand_2;
            operand_2 = result;
        }

        switch (opcode) {
            case 0x02:
                result = get_memory_dword(operand_1 & 0x0fffffff);
                break;
            case 0x03:
                set_memory_dword(operand_1) = operand_2;
                break;
            case 0x06:
                result = (result & operand_1) | operand_2;
                break;
            case 0x04:
                if (operand_1 == 0x80000880) {
                    operand_2 &= 0xfffffffd;
                }
                outl(operand_1, 0xcf8);
                outl(operand_2, 0xcfc);
                break;
            case 0x05:
                outl(operand_1, 0xcf8);
                result = inl(0xcfc);
                break;
            case 0x08:
                if (result != operand_1) {
                    eip += operand_2;
                }
                break;
            case 0x09:
                eip += operand_2;
                break;
            case 0x10:
                scratch = (scratch & operand_1) | operand_2;
                result = scratch;
                break;
            case 0x11:
                outb(operand_2, operand_1);
                break;
            case 0x12:
                result = inb(operand_1);
                break;
            case 0xee:
                run_xcodes = 0;
            default:
                break;
        }

        eip += 9;
    }
}

References

• Deconstructing the Boot ROM (I cannot express enough just how helpful this page is)