80-Bus News

Now we can see the affects of the DAA instruction, or at least it will become clear if you can unscramble the above table. Remember, the DAA instruction is to enable the use of packed BCD arithmetic. All right, what is packed BCD arithmetic. Well you all know we’ve got eight bits available in the accumulator, and to date we’ve been plugging it with data in HEX, two digits at a time, the characters 0 thro’ F. Now BCD stands for Binary Coded Decimal, and uses four bits to represent a decimal number, 0 thro’ 9. As we’ve got eight pits in the accumulator we can accommodate two decimal numbers, giving a decimal number range of 0 thro’ 99. The packed bit in ‘packed BCD’ simply means that there is more than one digit.

OK, so let’s add two numbers in decimal:

 15
+27
---
 42

Now lets add the packed binary representations of the two numbers

 0001 0101

+0010 0111

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 0011 1100

Well it’s obvious what has happened, the numbers were added in pure binary and not in packed BCD, now the Z80 doesn’t have an ‘ADD packed BCD’ instruction, but the DAA instruction is provided to affect the result in such a way that the effect of having an ‘ADD packed BCD’ instruction IS provided. The reason for doing it this way is because only one ‘correction’ instruction is required for seven operations, whereas seven additional instructions would be needed in the Z80 if this were to be implemented directly. Add up the numbers, low nibble first, 0101 + 0111 = 1100 = C, notice there is no ‘carry’ into the high nibble, so the invisible ‘half carry’ flag, H, is not set. By the same process, 00001 + 0010 = 0011 = 3, again, there is no carry, so the C flag wasn’t set. The result is 3C with neither the H or C flags set. Now to determine what the DAA instruction will do with it. By inspection, it looks as if the second row in the table satisfies these conditions, the upper digit is between 0 and 8 and there was no C, the H flag is 0 and the lower digit is between A and F. So the table says the DAA instruction will add 06 to the 3C in the accumulator and there will be no carry. Let’s try it:

 0011 1100

+0000 0110

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 0100 0010

Got it, w – e – l – l, I know it’s difficult, but if you indulge in a bit of practice you’ll soon see how it works. Go on try a few random two digit numbers and see if you can work it out from the table. Anyway, if you relate the above to the previous episode you’ll see how it all falls into place. As I said then, the trick is really knowing how the instructions work, and making use of what is provided.

So, having put the lid on the DAA instruction and how B2HEX works, onto the subject of todays lecture on the painful art. A thought has just passed its way through my feeble brain! If you’ve been waiting for me to get on with the job of explaining this opaque business, and have been moving towards the light at the rate at which I write this stuff, aren’t you fed up with it yet? If not, there are still some masochists out there!