8 Mar
2006
8 Mar
'06
2:14 p.m.
Thanks for the responses to my question. I was able to continue searching
from the tips and I'm pretty sure what I was asking
about must have been
from NRI. From what I came up with it also looks like that is long gone.
I am back to my original problem. How to learn the fundamentals of the 8088
or 8086 ... and then to continue from there to the larger chips. At the
moment I'm concerned about the 8088 or 8086. I have found resources that
introduce those chips in a very clear, step-by-step way and include the plans
for building a trainer. But they all stop short of interfacing FDDs, HDDs,
etc. Would anyone know how I could "learn-by-building" an 8088 or 8086 system
complete with drive interfaces, etc., starting with the very elementary aspects
of learning the chip architecture and hardware on through to systems with
FDDs and HDs and video, etc.? Thanks again.
Gary
"I think it was about 15-20 years ago there was, I believe, a self-study
course
put out by some company for learning the hardware (and I think some aspects
of software, i.e., DOS) of computing at that time. The course came with an
8088 computer that, if I recall correctly, one built and "learned by doing."
I'm pretty sure it was not a Heathkit. I have searched everywhere and have
not come up with anything. Does this sound familiar to anyone? Any information
would be helpful. I'm trying to track one of these courses/computers down.
Thanks!"
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10 Mar
10 Mar
2:21 a.m.
On 3/8/06, ericmac at swissinfo.org <ericmac at swissinfo.org> wrote:
Thanks for the responses to my question. I was able to
continue searching
from the tips and I'm pretty sure what I was asking about must have been
from NRI. From what I came up with it also looks like that is long gone.
I am back to my original problem. How to learn the fundamentals of the 8088
or 8086 ... and then to continue from there to the larger chips. At the
The best way to learn 8088 is to get a PC and install DOS and some
software on it, including DEBUG.COM, an editor, an assembler, then you
get an assembly language book and type in examples. If you want to
learn FDDs, HDDs, go read FreeDOS source code. for Video coding, just
google for examples. There are plenty.
moment I'm concerned about the 8088 or 8086. I
have found resources that
introduce those chips in a very clear, step-by-step way and include the plans
for building a trainer. But they all stop short of interfacing FDDs, HDDs,
etc. Would anyone know how I could "learn-by-building" an 8088 or 8086 system
complete with drive interfaces, etc., starting with the very elementary aspects
of learning the chip architecture and hardware on through to systems with
FDDs and HDs and video, etc.? Thanks again.
Gary
15 Mar
15 Mar
1:13 p.m.
9000 VAX wrote:
The best way to learn 8088 is to get a PC and install
DOS and some
software on it, including DEBUG.COM, an editor, an assembler, then you
get an assembly language book and type in examples.
I second this. Not to appear juvenile, but I've learned more about
assembler from cracking games and rewriting 286 code to run on 8088 than
I ever did while in school. What a happy day it was to load a
commercial program with slow screen updating code (excessive redundant
checks for retrace when only one check was necessary) and patch it so
that it was swift on the 8088. :-)
Working on my Athlon, I do everything in Windows and rely on utilities
to get things done. Working on my 8088, I write my own utils (sometimes
in assembler). It's just a different mindset. And while there are
things I would never attempt on the 8088 (such as MPEG-2 compression),
it is just as fast for most common-denominator tasks like writing text,
programming, etc.
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/
10:16 a.m.
At 12:13 PM 3/15/06 -0600, you wrote:
9000 VAX wrote:
I agree. Go find a copy of Inside the IBM PC and the other books
(Assembly Language Programming??) by Peter Norton. They explain the insides
of the PC very well.
Joe
The best way to learn 8088 is to get a PC and
install DOS and some
software on it, including DEBUG.COM, an editor, an assembler, then you
get an assembly language book and type in examples.
I second this. 
4:02 p.m.
Joe R. wrote:
I agree. Go find a copy of Inside the IBM PC and
the other books
(Assembly Language Programming??) by Peter Norton. They explain the insides
of the PC very well.
Joe
Ya know, I found the Norton book to be really disjointed --
it didn't present the information in an A to Z sort of way.
IIRC he didn't write it but lent his name to a previously
published book ("Assembly Language Safari on the IBM PC" by
mumble and mumble). I'll check my copy tonight & verify that.
OTOH, "Inside the IBM PC" is a *really* valuable tool,
as well as a historical resource, and you'd have to pry my
first edition copy from my cold, dead hands ;-)
Glen
0/0
16 Mar
16 Mar
9:42 a.m.
Okay, here's a list of books I have found to be
indispensible when working closely with IBM-type
PCs (and other 8088-based systems):
"Inside the IBM PC" by Peter Norton
1985, Brady Communications Co.
ISBN 0-89303-583-1 and 0-13-467325-5
--> Plenty of hardware details
"Advanced Assembly Language" by Steven Holzner and
Peter Norton Computing
1991, Brady Communications Co.
ISBN 0-13-658774-7
--> Lots of tips and tricks, includes code for Windows
--> and OS/2
"Bluebook of Assembly Language Routines for the
IBM PC and XT" by Christopher L. Morgan
1984, The Waite Group
ISBN 0-452-25498-1
--> Very nice "cookbook" of ready-to-use routines
"Assembly Language Quick Reference" by Allen L. Wyatt, Sr.
1989, Que Corp.
ISBN 0-88022-428-2
--> Instructions from A to Z, with details and
--> code examples
HTH
Glen
0/0
15 Mar
15 Mar
4:07 p.m.
I haven''t been following this thread too closely, but a very useful book
that straddles the hardware/software issue with the 8088/86 is "8086/8088
16-Bit Microprocessor Primer" by Chris Morgan and Mitch Waite, McGraw-Hill,
1982, ISBN 0-07-043109. Even has a fairly detailed section on the Great
Hope of Intel at the time, the iAPX-432 chipset, as well as a brief mention
of the 186 and 286.
Orientation is somewhat CP/M-ish and moderately historical. It's got a
section on the IBM Acorn (mentions that a 48K, one floppy system is listed
at $3830, but is going for $2235 at Computerland) and is a direct
competitor to Radio Shack and Apple systems. Mentions CP/M-86 extensively
and says that PC-DOS is CP/M-like and treats MS-DOS as if it were a
completely different animal from MS-DOS (just a few sentences on either).
If you can't find one, I think I've got an extra copy I might be convinced
to part with.
Cheers,
Chuck
3:09 p.m.
New subject: Screen update speed of 8088 PC (was: old 8088 system course++)
In article <44185948.7050804 at oldskool.org>,
Jim Leonard <trixter at oldskool.org> writes:
Working on my Athlon, I do everything in Windows and
rely on utilities
to get things done. Working on my 8088, I write my own utils (sometimes
in assembler). It's just a different mindset. And while there are
things I would never attempt on the 8088 (such as MPEG-2 compression),
it is just as fast for most common-denominator tasks like writing text,
programming, etc.
Assuming a full 80x25 screen write, what's the maximum frames/sec that
an 8088 could do on a monochrome or CGA interface?
Based on "8088 corruption", I'm guessing that CGA can do at least 30
fps.
--
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6:12 p.m.
New subject: Screen update speed of 8088 PC
Richard wrote:
If you don't care about synchronizing your updates with the display
cycle, you can do more. Assuming a 4.77MHz 8088 IBM PC, REP MOVSW from
regular RAM to display RAM (which is slower) is about 160KB/s. For
80x25 (4000bytes) that's roughly 40fps. REP STOSW is much faster (about
240KB/s) but that's not useful/practical in a textmode scenario so I
won't go with those numbers.
On monochrome, you can do this. On true CGA, you can't, because the ram
isn't truly dual-ported. As a result, when you read or write display
memory in an 80-column text mode, the adapter draws garbage wherever the
beam is instead of the real ram contents for the duration of the
user-initiated access. This is more commonly knows as "CGA snow". What
especially blows is that it will still draw "snow" even if you're only
reading -- even if your access is to an off-screen page!
To get around this, you write to CGA RAM while the beam is *not*
drawing, but retracing horizontally or vertically back to the next
scanline or display cycle. You can transfer about 250 words during a
vertical retrace and exactly one word during horizontal retrace, so
that's 450 words per frame, so a snow-less full-screen update would take
3 frames (20fps).
The obvious goal is to not be in the position of having to update the
*entire* screen.
40-column modes don't have a "snow" problem (not sure why), which is why
I chose 40x25 for my video program (that, and the lower data requirements).
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/
Working on my
Athlon, I do everything in Windows and rely on utilities
to get things done. Working on my 8088, I write my own utils (sometimes
in assembler). It's just a different mindset. And while there are
things I would never attempt on the 8088 (such as MPEG-2 compression),
it is just as fast for most common-denominator tasks like writing text,
programming, etc.
Assuming a full 80x25 screen write, what's the maximum frames/sec that
an 8088 could do on a monochrome or CGA interface?
Based on "8088 corruption", I'm guessing that CGA can do at least 30
fps.
6:37 p.m.
New subject: Screen update speed of 8088 PC
On 3/15/2006 at 5:12 PM Jim Leonard wrote:
To get around this, you write to CGA RAM while the beam
is *not*
drawing, but retracing horizontally or vertically back to the next
scanline or display cycle. You can transfer about 250 words during a
vertical retrace and exactly one word during horizontal retrace, so
that's 450 words per frame, so a snow-less full-screen update would take
3 frames (20fps).
The obvious goal is to not be in the position of having to update the
*entire* screen.
Maybe cheating a little, but:
Alternatively, you can install an EGA card running in CGA compatibility
mode. You can even double-buffer the thing (write to one bank while
displaying the other).
Cheers,
Chuck
9:41 p.m.
New subject: Screen update speed of 8088 PC
Chuck Guzis wrote:
A little? :-)
If I had an EGA card I'd be doing all sorts of unholy text things
(fonts, pixel-level panning, colors) to be worried about display update
speed ;-)
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/
The obvious
goal is to not be in the position of having to update the
*entire* screen.
Maybe cheating a little, but:
Alternatively, you can install an EGA card running in CGA compatibility
mode. You can even double-buffer the thing (write to one bank while
displaying the other). 
6:59 p.m.
New subject: Screen update speed of 8088 PC
On Wed, 15 Mar 2006, Jim Leonard wrote:
On monochrome, you can do this. On true CGA, you
can't, because the ram
isn't truly dual-ported. As a result, when you read or write display
memory in an 80-column text mode, the adapter draws garbage wherever the
beam is instead of the real ram contents for the duration of the
user-initiated access. This is more commonly knows as "CGA snow". What
especially blows is that it will still draw "snow" even if you're only
reading -- even if your access is to an off-screen page!
20 years ago, I wrote a screen capture program for Sybex, who used it for
most of their text mode books for a while. In order to get maximum
compatibility with ANYTHING that they might run (including TSRs), I made
the TSR for screen capture very simple. It would copy the screen RAM to a
4000 byte buffer when the "magic" key combo was pressed, and then poll for
a safe time to append it to a disk file. With that large buffer there, I
did not want to take up enough additional space to synchronize the screen
reads.
They were panicy about the CGA snow! They were worried about whether it
was damaging the monitor, etc.
So, I told them that it was just the "flash" from taking the picture, and
that it was a "FEATURE", to show whether the image had been successfully
captured. Such misstatements have a way of coming back to bite you - then
they wanted me to add the "flash" to the MDA captures.
9:43 p.m.
New subject: Screen update speed of 8088 PC
Fred Cisin wrote:
4000 byte buffer when the "magic" key combo
was pressed, and then poll for
Poll? How did you do this, and why was it necessary? I've written
screen capture programs before and I just dump straight to a file...
They were panicy about the CGA snow! They were
worried about whether it
was damaging the monitor, etc.
So, I told them that it was just the "flash" from taking the picture, and
that it was a "FEATURE", to show whether the image had been successfully
Oh my :-)
captured. Such misstatements have a way of coming
back to bite you - then
they wanted me to add the "flash" to the MDA captures.
So just XOR every screen word as you read it ;-)
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/
9:52 p.m.
New subject: Screen update speed of 8088 PC
On Wed, 15 Mar 2006, Jim Leonard wrote:
Some of the screens to be captured occured at times when file writing
could not be done safely. Use of the "indos" flag, INT 28h? etc. are
adequate for MOST purposes, but SOME screens can NOT be captured that way,
since by the time that the system was stable, the screen contents were no
longer the same. Hence "copy to RAM bufer, and THEN write once safe".
For example,... you want to show the screen contents when it is halfway
through XORing the bytes.
4000 byte
buffer when the "magic" key combo was pressed, and then poll for
Poll? How did you do this, and why was it necessary? I've written
screen capture programs before and I just dump straight to a file...
10:02 p.m.
New subject: Screen update speed of 8088 PC
On 3/15/2006 at 8:43 PM Jim Leonard wrote:
One problem I had with my screen capture programs was seeing if they were
actually doing anything. The snow would have been helpful, but you don't
get that on MDA :). So I just disabled the video during the capture,
resulting in a nice visible "blink". That would have also taken care of
the CGA snow issue.
Cheers,
Chuck
Poll? How did you do this, and why was it necessary?
I've written
screen capture programs before and I just dump straight to a file...
If you're working off a keypressed interrupt, you could never be sure that
DOS was in a reentrant state. So you save the capture information, check
the "INDOS" flag. If it's clear, go ahead and write. Otherwise, hook the
timer interrupt and try again in 55 msec.
> They were panicy about the CGA snow! They were
worried about whether it
> was damaging the monitor, etc.
> So, I told them that it was just the "flash" from taking the picture,
and
that it was a
"FEATURE", to show whether the image had been successfully
Oh my :-) 
7:38 p.m.
--- 9000 VAX <vax9000 at gmail.com> wrote:
Did it use ISA bus? This was the information that I
didn't find from google.
Lord no. Why would I be trying to juryrig a peecee
card into an ISA bus? The Tandy 2000 use a 96 pin (3
row) "Euro" connector. I'm comparing the difference
between what signals get carried out to it and the PC.
Don't know exactly when (ok if) this'll happen. It's
fun to dream though :).
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8:06 p.m.
a list of texts on 80x86 hardware and software (from
memory - I won't swear as to exact titles or author's
names). Most of these can be had on Amazonia FOR A
SONG:
The only text on assembly language (as far as I'm
concerned) - IBM PC Assembly Language and Programming,
Peter Abel, 1st Edition
The IBM Personal Computer from the Inside Out,
Seargent and Shoemaker, 1st edition has ancillary
coverage of the Peanut, 2nd the IBM PC/AT
Inside the IBM PC, Peter Norton, the first
Microprocessors and Interfacing, Douglas Hall
An Introduction to the Intel Family of
Microprocessors: A Hands-On Approach Utilizing the
8088 Microprocessor, James Antonakos - my edition has
a blue cover, has a sbc (single board computer)
project.
Interfacing to the IBM Personal Computer, Eggebrecht
- talks about the ISA bus and building cards for it
0521462800 - found this on Amazon just now.
Interesting.
there's others. Of course the IBM Tech manuals are
useful, but aren't texts.
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16 Mar
16 Mar
4:53 a.m.
Chris M wrote:
The only text on assembly language (as far as I'm
concerned) - IBM PC Assembly Language and Programming,
Peter Abel, 1st Edition
Amazon reviews disagree; who is right?
Two of my favorite 8088 assembler books were one that I have misplaced
and can't remember the name of, but it began by dumping you directly
into DEBUG and you wrote your first assembler programs in it (even
saving your work to disk and loading it back to make edits). Writing
functional programs directly in debug, no source code but the binary
opcodes themselves, made a few bulbs turn on in my head.
The second was Abrash's Zen of Assembler. He tends to beat a point into
the ground, redundantly and repeatedly, but overall it is fascinating
reading and most definitely has helped my speed optimization skills.
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/
7:33 p.m.
--- Jim Leonard <trixter at oldskool.org> wrote:
Chris M wrote:
YO!! I wrote the review:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0134481437/ref=sr_11_1/103-8150401-5296666…
Just so happens that I'm the only one that reviewed
the first edition ;). Don't know, had heard that later
editions were not as good. Everything depends on the
individual I guess. Some things work better for some,
not so better for others. Read my review. I'm a self
learner, and that book did it, when I decided to dig
my heals in. Had my little tape recorder and dictated
notes to myself...transcribed them to paper later (it
works!).
Just a suggestion...
The only text on assembly language (as far as
I'm
concerned) - IBM PC Assembly Language and
Programming,
Peter Abel, 1st Edition
Amazon reviews disagree; who is right? Two of my favorite 8088 assembler books were one
that I have misplaced
and can't remember the name of, but it began by
dumping you directly
into DEBUG and you wrote your first assembler
programs in it (even
saving your work to disk and loading it back to make
edits). Writing
functional programs directly in debug, no source
code but the binary
opcodes themselves, made a few bulbs turn on in my
head.
Yup, he did that in the book. Debug rocks! And as a
matter of fact, if you've done nothing else but BASIC,
learning the assembler mechanics itself is a little
weird (again praise for Abel's handling of it). All
that formatting stuph annoyed me origanally as I
recall.
The second was Abrash's Zen of Assembler. He
tends
to beat a point into
the ground, redundantly and repeatedly, but overall
it is fascinating
reading and most definitely has helped my speed
optimization skills.
Right, optimization is what he strives to teach in
his books. Also has Zen of Graphics Programming and
the Graphics Programming Black Book (amongst others I
presume). He used to write for PC Tech Journal also.
Note, although Zen of Assembly Language has come down
in price (used to be like $75, now about $45), it
comes on the cd that's included with Graphics Program
Black Book, and that's half the price.
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