Investigate the MIPS programmers model and develop an object-oriented design that will reflect aspects of the MIPS architecture. Consider the functional units of the architecture and how they are used in the five execution steps for an instruction.
For example, consider the representation of memory and program registers. What methods will be needed to access them? Is it useful to have an underlying model for a machine word? What extra methods are needed for internal registers such as the program counter and instruction register?
Since a real processor can perform many actions concurrently, speed is improved if the decoding stage prepares all the information that may be used even if the effort is wasted for a particular instruction. A good simulator will follow such a pattern.