Verilator

I design a simple single cycle processor which will eventually become superscaler out of order but I'm trying to test the bare bones design first. I designed the architecture around the MIPS I ISA (including a couple MIPS II instructions as well). Basically what I have done is compile a c++ program, extract the hex hump from the binary and feed it into my processor's "memory" and now I want to see if the program works. Right now I just have a simple "Hello World" program to run but I don't know exactly how to do it. I can run my own very small test program by just making a simple state machine in c++ which loads a new instruction for each clock cycle. Do you have an incite as to how I would do this? I can run my c++ top file but how do I go about debugging to see of the test program is working? I assume I don't just go line by line through all the instructions in memory. Could someone explain to me the process flow of doing this? If any more info is needed I'm happy to give it.