SICvm - A SIC Based Virtual Machine

SIC ain't SICK

Click Here To Visit the SICvm Project Page in Sourceforge.net

SICvm is a SIC virtual machine based On Leland L.Beck's "Simplified Instruction Set Computer" as he mentioned in his book "System Software" Click Here To see Beck's Site on the Original SIC Simulator

Latest News

2026-05-22

Migrated SICvm from sourceforge.net to GitHub.
- Thank you SourceForge for helping host this project and website for 20 years.
Convert all the pages to be static, hardcode all the guestbook and news entries.
Move SICvm project to GitHub organization SICvm.
- Hosts website via GitHub Pages.
- Hosts code in the sicvm repository.
Thanks to Claude Code for helping with the migration with minimal effort.

Older News...

Other Projects

Janus86 - A Bootloader integrated Kernel. Janus86 is a new genre of kernel for x86 architecture providing functionalities of a kernel under the protected/real modes of operation and can be deployed to boot a bigger kernel.

Thanks To...

SourceForge.net for hosting and providing Web space for my Project.

freecsstemplates.org for providing CSS for this Web Site under CC License.

php - The Generic Scripting Language used in Web Development. Powers the Front-End of SICvm Guestbook.

MySQL - The world's most popular open source database. Powers the Back-End of SICvm Guestbook.

GNU - This project is Licensed under GNU's General Public License (GPL).

Mozilla Firefox and the Web Developer Extension. (Excellent Stuff for Web Developers).

nVu - The Opensource Cross-platform HTML Editor based on Gecko 1.7. Used to Edit the HTML of this site.

A little Flashback

SICvm was originally conceived as a full fledged Virtual Machine running multiple instances on a Customized Kernel to support the Virtual Machine. The project was intended to be a Proof of Concept (PoC) of the Virtualization Technology that pretty much fascinated me back in 7th Semester during the College Days.

Simplified Instruction Set Computer or SIC for short is a hypothetical machine introduced by Leland L.Beck for simplifying the teaching the design of Assemblers, Compilers, Operating Systems...etc

Many people, including my project coordinator back in College asked me Why Choose SIC? At first sight this might feel a bit of over simplification. But I intended it to keep it simple, most people start their base in Emulators by programming a Z80 based system, but since Beck had a simplified overview of a stripped machine that was used as a base for Assembler Design and Compiler Design, I thought why not extend the very concept to a Beginner's guide to Emulating a System. Also Beck does give a very good insight into the SIC architecture in his book "System Software." You can check out the book here.

Unfortunately due to time constrains and lack of experience led me to build a Virtual Machine (Based on SIC), running on an x86 Platform, this also includes an Assembler for assembling the SIC instruction. It does not have a dedicated kernel and hence is not stand alone. This is still a work in progress

Pending Works

Build a FA Based Parser for the Assembler
Design a Kernel for the VM to Run in
Extend the Architecture of the Machine to Support SIC/XE