Reply to: Win32 Assembler

[expat]

One byte (or digit as you refer to it here) is good enough for well over the century, but I am sure you just packed 10 years into 4 bits...

I was quite precise: the program used one digit for the year. As it happens, it did implement this in one byte.

[AtW]

to save space had only one digit for the year: the leading "197" was assumed. I had to fix it, in 1980 of course.

One byte (or digit as you refer to it here) is good enough for well over the century, but I am sure you just packed 10 years into 4 bits...

[expat]

So you missed the sheer unadulterated joy of programming the 80x86 in Real Mode...

I started assembler programming in a real assember for a real computer: BAL.

Have also done it for fun, for the Commodore 64, of blessed memory. Wrote a game for my own amusement, that involved lobbing missiles at my office building.

And for an IBM "Data Station", the 3740 if my fading memory serves me. That was one to make Y2K pale in comparison: IBM had this buy-once-no-support Hospital Outpatient Billing system that ran on that diskette punch machine. It was written in its own assembly language, and to save space had only one digit for the year: the leading "197" was assumed. I had to fix it, in 1980 of course.

I did like programming. In those days if the machines came with a coin-slot for another half-hour of programming, I'd have been feeding the coins in. Now I can't afford to do just programming. Anyway, back to writing my standards document.

[DaveB]

I did indeed, but I did get to play with some of the first Sun Sparc stations and learn the joys of BSD on a PDP-11 via VT-100 terminals.

They had a couple of Vaxen as well but I took one look at VMS and decided to do Database Theory and Design instead

[DaveB]

Thats what I seemed to remember from the dim and distant past of my Uni days. Did a modules worth of 68000 assembler programming on Apple Macintoshes.

Also did a modules worth of Cobol. Was about this time I decided I really didnt want to be a programmer

[expat]

Shouldn't that be X86 Assembler? Or am I horribly out of date?

Well, yes, an assembler assembles object code by translating mnemonic op-codes and references, so really an assembler is for a machine and not for software.

Theoretically.

[AtW]

Petzold's book was about Win 3.1 stuff, but I think he updated it recently to Win32, but nobody cares about that stuff these days.

[Churchill]

Gordon Letwin - A God!

[ASB]

I am pretty sure that there was a book by Charles Petzold, but I can't find reference to it anywhere. It predated Win32 somewhat though.

Edit: might give you a start point http://win32assembly.online.fr/faq.html

[zeitghost]

Thanks for the advice, chaps.

I think.

I entitled it Win32 assembler coz that's what it's touted as.

If one is so foolish as to google on Win32 assembler, one finds that this is a common method of reference for this topic.

However, some distinction must be made between the merely insane who write 32 bit assembler, presumably for console apps, and the truly barmy, who write 32 bit assembler to access the API.

Don't suppose anyone has any idea if there's some sort of tome one might purchase & read so that one knows a trifle more than one's unenthusiastic students?

All my vast collection of assembler books are for the dos 16 bit world, so not a lot of use.

The one great advantage of 32 bit is the end of fecking segments & offsets, designed in to make it easy to convert 8080 programs for fecks sake.

[ASB]

Yes Win32s was their addon to Win3.11

Presumably that didn't go until Warp??

Most of the stuff I did was for 1.3 and still runs on 1.3 (if you can find any kit that will run 1.3 that is) and upto w2k.

[VectraMan]

I saw OS/2 once. Really I did.

It is most certainly Win32s - not true Win32 that (AFAIK) was not even present in Windows 95, the 's one was for Win 3.1 I think.

Yes Win32s was their addon to Win3.11 to encourage people to start developing for 32-bit, whilst Win95 was still some way off. IIRC you didn't get threads, but you got most of the basic win32 API. I wrote stuff for it that worked okay. Working in multimedia the 64K block limitation of 16-bit addressing was a pain in the arse, so being able to write for 32-bit even a sort of fudged 32-bit was a big advantage.

It's also why I learnt x86 assembler. You still had segments in the 386 protected Windows 3 16-bit world, just one for every 64K block. In C you could only address 64K blocks at a time efficiently, otherwise you'd have to use huge pointers which came with an overhead. In assembler you could get a segment and use a 32-bit offset.

Nostalgia just aint what it used to be.

[AtW]

They had a version called OS/2 for Windows - there it was possible to run at least some of the native windows binaries, think windows 3.1, maybe 95 - by that I mean gUI stuff.

If you talking about console mode, then it is simple - OS/2 was developed by Microsoft and dll maps for console mode pretty much there, so it is not suprising programs are reasonably compatible.

I am very tired today, and whole month actually - contract work

But it pays very well, so it's more like

[ASB]

Maybe they added it later - the last OS/2 I tried was v2.0 I think, this was around the time when everyone used Win 3.1 while I preferred DOS, still use Norton Commander now.

Either you're being particularly dense or I'm being more obtuse than normal. I wouldn't rule out either.

OS2 [ie real pukka OS2 on the box] had a windows subsystem. Thus it could run windows 3.1 apps (after a fashion). It was probably this that was the last nail in the coffin. This certainly never provided the Win32s api. Straight 16 bit.

Now, NT thru W2k run OS2 console applications. That is what I was referring to. Now, last time I wrote any x86 assembler it used seg/offset 20 bit adressing. I was just using this to counter your assertion that there is no such thing any more (in truth of course there isn't since when windows runs an os2 process hosted in os2.exe it maps it to a flat 32 bit model). But I still have some OS2 assembler written yonks ago running on W2k via said host process.

Of course this is now way

[AtW]

Maybe they added it later - the last OS/2 I tried was v2.0 I think, this was around the time when everyone used Win 3.1 while I preferred DOS, still use Norton Commander now.