INMC 80 News

Enough of the flowery stuff (and I haven’t touched a drop all night even though it’s Christmas. Shows how long ago this was written.) I got out the instructions and didn’t understand half the words in the book as it was written in ‘foriegn’ disguised as English. But I understood the circuits and layout diagrams, so I assembled it. A PSU was hastily designed on the back of a fag packet and the parts procured. Three days after my escape from Chesham I switched it on and it worked (no, no problems at all). Well it worked. Now what do you do with it?

I fumbled through the manuals and discovered that the ‘T’ and ‘M’ commands worked and that I could alter locations within the memory and then redisplay what I had done. I tried to understand the big program in the software book, as an example of what to do (it turned out to be a listing of the monitor, but I don’t remember that I realised this at the time). But there was no clue here. Everything was utterly incomprehensible. Well this was a fine start. #200.00 worth of computer I couldn’t use, when the punters who had paid their deposits saw it, I’d be a likely guest at a lynching with me as main participant. My govenors would be at the front of the crowd making sure the knots were tight, as it was I who had recommended that XXXXX’s buy the darned things in the first place. I had to make it do something to prove to the customers, who would be collecting in a couple of weeks, that they hadn’t spent a couple of hundred quid on a pile of electronic junk, and that they really didn’t want their money back.

Don’t try to be too clever, Dave (Very friendly guy, calls himself by his first name !- Ed.), little steps are always the easiest. First define what it is I intend to make it do.

Always know what it is you intend to do. I was told once that the definition of the ‘Genius Level Programmer’ is someone who writes a program, tests it to find out what it does, and then writes the specification. None of us are geniuses, so keep it simple, and always know what you are about.

So I have about a week to prove that it will do something, but what? How about making an asterisk blink on and off on the screen. That would prove that I had some control over it. So think!!!

First of all it’s necessary to get some idea of the syntax of the machine instructions. Read and reread the Z80 technical manual. Machine instructions are written in mnemonics. That means it’s supposed to make it easy to remember. This is true of some, like ‘LD’ stands for ‘load’. But others are impossible. Who would know that “DJNZ’ meant ‘decrement, jump not zero’ unless I had just told you. I think it’s done as a convenient shorthand and saves cramped wrists when hand assembling programs. The first thing about the instruction codes is that they are split into groups, 8 bit, 16 bit, load, logical, arithmetic, etc. Another thing is that when dealing with a ‘from – to’ type instruction, like a load, the destination is always first, the source is always last. So LD A,C means load (remember from the last episode this actually means copy) A with C. Or literally, fill A with a copy of C. That load instruction its known as a ‘load register direct’ instruction. Think about it, it’s sensible. Another one is to ‘load register immediate’, that is don’t copy the data from anywhere, just put it there. These Zilog people seem to use ‘n’ to represent the data, so LD A,n means load A (destination first again, notice) with ‘n’, whatever ‘n’ might be. An interesting group of load instructions is the ‘load register indirect’ (a less sensible definition I think), this is where one of the main 16 bit register pairs, HL, DE or BC is loaded with a 16 bit address, and then a register is loaded with the data ‘pointed at’ by the 16 bit register pair. LD A,(HL) is one of this group. The brackets round the HL indicate that it is indirect, and it is the contents of the location pointed to by HL which we are interested in. Yet another of these instruction types is the ‘load ext addr’ where the idea is to either load an address location with the contents of a register, or vice versa. So LD A,(nn), two ‘n’s indicating a 16 «bit address, means fill A with a copy of the contents of address ‘nn’. Note the brackets again indicate that it is the contents of the address we are interested in, and not the address itself. There are two other types, ‘indexed’ and ‘implied’. I’ll let you work those out for yourself.