Installing and Using Ripes

Ripes is a visual simulation tool for the RISC-V architecture. Unlike Logisim Evolution (which focuses on circuit-level simulation), Ripes operates at the microarchitecture and instruction level, making it ideal for understanding:

• how instructions execute inside a CPU
• differences between single-cycle, multi-cycle, and pipelined CPUs
• coordination between registers, the ALU, control signals, and the datapath

Ripes includes multiple RISC-V CPU models and supports cycle-by-cycle / stage-by-stage visualization.

Installation

Ripes provides prebuilt releases for Windows, Linux, and macOS. Download them from:

• https://github.com/mortbopet/Ripes/releases

This manual uses Ripes 2.2.6.

Linux (AppImage)

On Linux, Ripes is distributed as an AppImage. After downloading, mark it executable and run it directly:

chmod a+x Ripes-<version>.AppImage
./Ripes-<version>.AppImage

Windows (VC++ runtime)

On Windows, Ripes requires the Microsoft Visual C++ runtime. If you see errors like msvcp140.dll missing, install the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable from Microsoft’s official website and restart Ripes.

Interface overview

See Figure 1.2 for an overview of the Ripes interface.

Figure 1.2: Ripes graphical interface.

Ripes consists of multiple views (switchable in the left sidebar), including:

• Code editor: write and view RISC-V assembly programs
• Processor view: visualize the CPU datapath or pipeline
• Cache view: visualize cache structure
• Memory view: inspect how code/data are laid out in memory
• I/O view: configure and interact with devices such as an LED matrix

These views allow you to observe instruction execution inside the CPU.