INMC 80 News

And 42H is the letter ‘B’ in the ASCII code. Weren’t we lucky that the ASCII code works so neatly in our favour. Well not quite, because we cheated and added 40H, which is hardly what you would expect as an ASCII offset. 30H would be more likely. Still, lets plod on, and see what’s next.

Line 4540. Another DAA? Well what purpose could that serve. In this instance, none, there are no carries from the low nibble, and none from the high nibble, so our 42H remains 42H.

Line 4545. Just another comment, telling us were about to print the character.

Line 4550. The idea is to send the character in A to the screen where it will be printed. Of course, it would be simple to CALL the CRT routine, but this would seriously reduce the usefulness of the monitor. In NAS-SYS, use is made of a generalized output routine called ROUT, ROUT takes the character and directs where ever the various output options dictate, this would normally be the screen, but not always. There are some very clever ways in which NAS-SYS or the user can trap data sent through ROUT and reprocess it. Perhaps well discuss some of the cleverer bits of NAS-SYS next time. Anyway, the CALL will PUSH the return address on the STACK, go away and do its thing, and return to line 4555.

Line 4555. This is a simple return. The return address is already on the STACK, and (unless some other routine screwed it up, and it won’t get it wrong without outside help) the SP will be pointing to it. The address in retrieved from the STACK and placed in the PC register, decrementing the SP as it goes. The routine makes an orderly return to line 4505, with the SP pointing to the data placed on the STACK by the PUSH in line 4475.

Line 4505. The POP AF instruction puts the original contents of the A register back in place, and in so doing, decrements the SP to point at the return address of the routine which originally CALLed B2HEX. Now this is one of the sneakier tricks of writing machine code programs. Notice, previously, we CALLed B1HEX (a meaningless label, except to indicate ‘send one character of B2HEX’), this time we don’t CALL it, all the relevant information is in the right place, namely, the low nibble of A now contains the character to be converted and sent next. By simply ‘dropping through’, we have avoided another call, and it’s associated return, and made for a nice tidy job.

Line 4520. Mask out the high nibble to leave 05H in the A register.

Line 4525. ADD 90H, so that any overflow in the low nibble will he transferred to the C flag after the following DAA instruction.

Line 4530. DAA. In this instance there is no overflow, and the contents of the A register remain unchanged, and the C flag is not set.

Line 4535. ADD with Carry, the ASCII offset, which previously we had ‘fiddled’ to make the earlier answer right. This time our 95H in the A register has become D5H after having 40H added to it. As there was no carry from the previous DAA, the low nibble, 5, remains unchanged. D5H is a suspicious number, as, if it were treated as decimal, there would be an overflow, and a correction in the high nibble, which makes it a likely candidate for the following DAA instruction, which last time round seemed to serve no purpose.

Line 4540. DAA. Guess what? The previous ADC has not affected the low nibble, so there is no ‘Half Carry’ through to the high nibble. But the high nibble, D, is 13 (decimal), so the high nibble is replaced with 3, and the C flag is set. So by some sort of jiggery-pokery, the byte in A has become 35H,