I have some questions regarding storing values from register to memory and loading from memory in MIPS.

First, when i want to store a value to the memory.
How do i know where to store it in memory( address)? Do i just randomly select the address?

And yes I tried storing register's value to memory by just using addresses like 0x00000001, 11, 0x11111111, 0x10000001. But,it always runs into an error saying :
Unaligned address in store
I am totally not understanding this alignment thing
Can someone explain this alignment to me?

Question

I have some questions regarding storing values from register to memory and loading from memory in MIPS.

First, when i want to store a value to the memory.
How do i know where to store it in memory( address)? Do i just randomly select the address?

And yes I tried storing register's value to memory by just using addresses like 0x00000001, 11, 0x11111111, 0x10000001. But,it always runs into an error saying :   
                       Unaligned address in store
I am totally not understanding this alignment thing
Can someone explain this alignment to me?

e.mccormick · Answer

This is a machine organization class that has notes: http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/sum2003/cmsc311/ Hopefully you can find what you ned there. I found several pages on memory use.

myname · Answer

(This is for mips simulator spim)
I see how to align the address. But still not sure what this really means in depth.
Like lets say why does the address start at 0x10000000 ?
So what does the other addresses smaller than this contain?
And what do the space between the addresses mean? Especially, the gap is so big between some of the addresses like 0x10000010 and 0x10000100.