8088 Assembler And Tracer Toolkit Download Videos

I know most of these games were coded in assembly (Marble Madness was an exception, it was coded in C) in order to take full advantage of the processors of that time (6502, 68000, Z80, 8088), but what development environments did they use to make code (code editor, assembler, debugger)? Nowadays we have a wide array of IDEs such as Eclipse, Visual Studio, Dev-C++, Embarcadero. Did they use a plain text editor to type the code, or did they use something similar to Turbo Pascal? How were variable values at a certain point of execution detected back then while testing the game on an arcade or home console board? How did they build the ROM? Did game developers also need some knowledge of electrical circuitry and electrical engineering?

Is it really so hard as all that to write good assembler code for the IBM PC? Yes! Thanks to the decidedly quirky nature of the 8088 processor, assembly language differs fundamentally from other languages, and is undeniably harder to work with. On the other hand, the potential of assembler code is much greater than that of other languages, as well. The Zen of assembler is the way to tap that potential.

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The primary virtue of Figure 3.2 is that it moves us away from the comfortable, human-oriented perspective of Figure 3.1 and forces us to view program execution at a level closer to the true nature of the beast, as consisting of nothing more than the performance of a sequence of instructions that command the 8088 to perform actions; in some cases, those actions involve accessing memory and/or devices over the PC bus. From the software side, we can now see that all code consists of machine-language instructions in the end, so the distinction between high-level languages, system software, and assembler vanishes. From the hardware side, we can see that the 8088 is not the lowest level, and we can begin to appreciate the many ways in which hardware can directly affect code performance.

Listing 7-6 runs in just 13.79 ms, more than three times as fast as Listing 7-4, even though Listing 7-4 uses the efficient loop and les instructions. This example is a powerful reminder of two important aspects of the Zen of assembler. First, you must strive to play to the strengths of the 8088 (such as the string instructions) while sidestepping its weaknesses (such as the segments and slow memory access speed). Second, you must always concentrate on moving cycles out of loops. The lds and les instructions outside the loop in Listing 7-6 effectively run 1000 times faster than the les instructions inside the loop in Listing 7-4, since the latter are executed 1000 times but the former are executed only once.

The important point is that in 8088 assembler it often matters which registers and/or which forms of various instructions you select. Two seemingly similar code sequences, such as Listings 8-12 and 8-13, can actually have quite different performance characteristics.

Animation is a marginal application for the PC, by which I mean that the 8088 barely has enough horsepower to support decent animation under the best of circumstances. What that means is that the Zen of assembler is an absolute must for PC animation.

DEBUG's code went through a number of changes (and 'bug fixes' too) over the years! Some of these internal changes were related to DOS system calls and screen output, then there was the change in file type from a .COM to an .EXE program under DOS 5.0. But in spite of all those changes and others which followed, DEBUG has never had an official revision since 2.40 (those digits have been embedded inside all versions of DEBUG since DOS 3.0). We can only guess about the real reasons that Microsoft never updated DEBUG to handle instructions beyond those of the Intel 8086/8087/8088 processors. Microsoft did create their own Assembler (MASM), 'C' compiler and Debugger (CodeView ); which you could use too, if you were willing to pay extra, so that could have been one of their reasons. Rather than using MASM and CodeView, many opted for the less expensive Borland assembler (TASM) and Turbo Debugger when they appeared, or some other commercial product. However, users and students alike can still learn a great deal about Assembly language by using DEBUG. be457b7860