### A good answer might be:

A register is a part of the processor that holds a bit pattern. Processors have many registers.

# Starting SPIM

MIPS R2000 processors have 32 general purpose registers, each holding 32 bits. They also have registers other than general purpose ones.

The first example SPIM program puts bit patterns representing integers into two registers. Then it adds the two patterns together. The screen shots for this example are from a MS Win ME system, but any Windows OS will be similar. Unix and Linux should be close.

To start SPIM click on its icon, reached (on my system) by first clicking on the start button.

If you have not installed SPIM see the appendix.

### QUESTION 2:

How else can SPIM be started?