I’m feeling kind of nostalgic today so I thought I’d write Hello, world! in Z80 assembly for the ZX Spectrum! The last time I wrote any Z80 assembly was when I was 14 so around 36 years ago! I may be a little rusty!
↫ Old Man By the Sea
It’s easy to tell the world hello in BASIC, but a bit more involved in Z80 assembly.
Ha ha…
BC (and DE). The 8 bit microprocessor did not have native 16-bit registers. However it was able to group two of them to get the same effect (BC = B+C).
This is not too uncommon, though. x86 used register pairs (DX:AX) for division and multiplication for a similar effect. But Z80 had to use this for basic indices. So essentially B and C were almost never separate (You can map them to BH:BL = BX, and others similarly. Though the workhorse is HL = AX essentailly)
I might have done some z80 assembly on TI calculators back in the day, but I was just following along other people’s work.
x86 was really where I learned how to write assembly code proficiently.
All software builds up from relatively simple building blocks. Although x86 protected mode and descriptor tables aren’t very accessible to a newbie, but real mode programming was simple enough. DOS was almost the ideal platform for assembly tinkering! It’s rare that I do any of that anymore, it’s all abstracted away by operating systems and compilers.
Alfman,
DOS was awesome, since it came with a very accessible assembler, debug.com
It was the best thing for a hobbyist like me. No need to buy expensive compiler suits, it just came with the operating system, and arguably “one step better” than GW-BASIC
For nostalgia sake, I found a nice article:
https://susam.net/programming-with-dos-debugger.html
sukru,
I did not find debug to be that useful. Crude and missing instructions…I guess if you had absolutely nothing else. It’s the “edlin” of debuggers 🙂
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edlin
Turbo debug was a treat though. Borland had the best DOS tools. Even the microsoft shops I was familiar with owned copies and used them over microsoft’s. Borland didn’t last in a windows world though.
A lot of windows shops used Visual Basic for windows stuff: VB4/5/6. You’d think that Visual C would be equally useful, but it was quite bad by comparison. I suppose it was a completely separate team that designed it. I still have the misfortune of supporting old visual C software. DotNET programming is the spiritual successor to VB and a far better choice if one actually has a choice.