The tests directory contains two subdirectories: data and programs.
The programs subdirectory contains source programs for the assembler. Ideally, these programs would be assembled, run in the simulator, then their output state compared to the expected value.
The data subdirectory contains input and output data for the tests.
The tests/programs/decompress.txt file contains a program to decompress a compressed text string. This program can be assembled from the root directory of the repository in the following way:
./tools/assembler.py tests/programs/decompress.txt /tmp/asm.out
Before the test can be run in the simulator, test data for the program needs to be created from the original tests/data/sample.txt text file. This is compressed using the tools/compression/distance_pair.py tool:
./tools/compression/compress.py --compress --bits 4 tests/data/sample.txt tests/data/compressed.bin
The program expects to find compressed data at a particular address in the simulator's memory. We specify this by passing the -d option to tools/simulator.py with two arguments: the address and the name of file to unpack at that address. The program writes the decompressed output text to memory, starting at another fixed address. We collect this data by passing the -x option and two arguments: the start address of the output data and the number of bytes to read:
./tools/simulator.py -d 4096 tests/data/compressed.bin -x 8192 164 /tmp/asm
The result is a dump of the memory from the simulator after the program has finished running. It should contain a copy of the original uncompressed text string.