PHFC

The PHFC project is a formidable CUSP emulator designed to be as ANSI C compliant as possible. PHFC can stand for any of the following: Phaeton's Hack for CUSP, PHFC Hobbles Functional Chips, PHFC Has Funny Characteristics, or PHFC Handles CUSP. Although some may speculate that "PHFC" is merely the result of applying ROT-13 to "CUSP", rest assured that these assertions are untrue.

For those unfamiliar with CUSP, it is an abbreviation for "Carleton's Utterly Simple Processor." CUSP is a fabricated microprocessor that was developed at the University of Carleton's Department of Systems and Computer Engineering in Canada. The corresponding textbook was created to facilitate instruction of the machine language course. The first iteration of the CUSP emulator was written in Turbo Pascal, utilizing MS-DOS. It presented a text-character interface. Since its inception, the original CUSP emulator has only been distributed in binary form without source code. Additionally, no updated version has been released to employ updated graphical systems. The most recent version of CUSP, Version 5.00, was copyrighted in 1991 by John C. Bryant and Gerald M. Karam.

The following are goals of the PHFC project: The original CUSP emulator was written in Turbo Pascal. However, PHFC is to be written mostly in C. The original CUSP was released under a non-free license, whereas PHFC is protected by the GNU GPL license. The core of PHFC, the primary CUSP emulator, must remain in pure ANSI C to ensure widespread portability. Some code, such as platform-dependent code and the PHFC core interface, can deviate from ANSI C. These more flexible sections may take advantage of local interfacing to offer graphic capabilities, which are not feasible in the original CUSP emulator.

Finally, a primary aim of the PHFC project is to convince the University of California, Los Angeles to abandon CUSP for their Computer Science's Assembly Language course.