INMC 80 News

Anyway, to business, to date we’ve been through most of the important bits of learning to program in machine assembler. Yes believe it or not, you have. From now on in it’s learning the tricks of the trade and figuring it out for yourself. Of course there are thousands of little tricks that can be learned, but most of these will either come with practice, or by pinching them from elsewhere. As far as pinching ideas from elsewhere goes, every Nascom owner has a complete library of software waiting to be lifted. Yup, you got it, NAS-SYS (or Nasbug). It’s completely within the rules to use bits of the monitor as a guide for things that you might find difficult to figure out for yourself. That’s why the complete listing has been provided, and in Richard’s view (he wrote Nasbug T4 and both NAS-SYSii) imitation is the sincerest form of flattery (I know, ’cos I asked him). If anyone wanted to make a complete mystery of the monitor, they would not have published the listing, like some other machines I could mention. So, try to understand the monitor. The comments are a bit brief (where they exist), because the monitors were written with the aid of the ZEAP assembler, and at the time Richard only had 32K of RAM to work in. So it meant that there wasn’t much space to waste on comments. I’m not suggesting you kick the moggie out of the comfy chair and sit down and digest the lot in one go. If you did manage it, I doubt that you’d remember much of what you read, and even less understand it. No, break it up into nice little chunks. Pick the shorter and easier routines first, and, if you’ll take my advice, leave the KBD routine till last. If you start on the KBD routine, you WILL end up on the funny farm.

As my contribution to the exercise, I’m going to attempt to describe the routine known as B2HEX. I’ve chosen this one, partly because it’s short, partly because for the most part it’s easy, and mainly because the later version in NAS-SYS employs one of those programming tricks by way of example. The listing below is from NAS-SYS 3, but apart from its absolute address, it’s identical to the NAS-SYS 1 version. Now remember from the last episode I mentioned the need to make the labels mean something, well B2HEX is the epitome of the cryptic label writer’s art. Those of you who complete the TIMES crossword on the way to work will have got it already. For those not so quick on the uptake, B2HEX means ‘Binary To HEX’. Neat isn’t it?

Before we get bogged down in the innards of B2HEX, there are a few things that have to be explained. Firstly, lets get a few definitions out of the way. A nibble!? This is an expression that has crept into use with 4 bit processors. A 16 bit processor works with 16 bits WORDs, an 8 bit processor works with 8 bit BYTEs, so some comedian decided that as a ‘4 bit unit’ was half a BYTE, the definition of a ought to be a Nibble, and it’s stuck. So we have:

To date we haven’t dealt in detail with the Stack Pointer register. Now the Stack (that’s the area of memory the SP points to) is rather important. It’s best thought of as a vertical column of pigeon holes, the top being the highest address assigned to it, the bottom being the lowest address it reaches in normal use. (In abnormal use, it could be anywhere and any depth, and that is a common cause of “crashes” where the stack comes so far down that it overwrites the program beneath it.) Now there are many occasions where we need to tuck things away out of sight where they won’t get corrupted by normal processor register manipulations. In other words, we want to save something till later, and then retrieve it in one piece. That’s what the Stack is for. The Stack normally works in pairs of pigeon holes, as more often than not, it’s two byte addresses we want to save. To make this process a bit more manageable, the Z80 looks after the Stack automatically, and saves everything else in pairs as well, so if, for instance we wanted to save the B register, we’d actually save the BC pair. A point to note when retrieveing data from the Stack, as when B is restored, C is also restored to its previous value.