You missed SPIM as well! Despite being a bit long in the tooth, SPIM makes it really easy for students to step through MIPS assembly and get a good feel for how

You missed SPIM as well! Despite being a bit long in the tooth, SPIM makes it really easy for students to step through MIPS assembly and get a good feel for how registers are mutated by the different instructions, etc. I taught an architecture class using Patterson & Hennessy, and I wish I'd known about MIPSfpga at the time (maybe it didn't exist, it was a while ago). That would have definitely been helpful for the more eager students to dig deeper into how all this stuff works.