And thankyou for your help! I've been programming professionally since 1979 and have built multi-million line programs. But over the years I've been isolated as to designing and building new technology in Skunk Works type groups. But in the past few years (due to multi-million dollar budgets and management calling the shots) I've been reassigned to revisioning code written by others and have found myself in trouble understanding their code. I've been posting here the last month or so as a method of re-tooling myself. By going back and working on entry level programs written by others it has actually helped me. I've programmed in many languages, many processors in assembly but must admit I'm a tad rusty with MIPS as haven't touched it in a couple years. Usually its SIMD instructions on 80x86, ALTIVEC.
I'll need to wrap this up though this code can actually be heavily optimized but until you have a much better understanding of the MIPS processor and its instruction set, it would not be appropriate to do so now!