Welcome to the World of Assembly

Language Programming
By Hasan Murad
Lecturer,
Department of Computer Science and Engineering,
University of Asia Pacific
 References
• Assembly Language Programming and
Organization of the IBM PC
--- Ytha Yu and Charles Marut

• Assembly Language for the IBM-PC

--- Kip R. Irvine

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 The Beginning !
• What is Assembly Language?

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 About Assembly
• Assembly is human-readable machine code
• Gives you complete control over the system's
resources

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 Why use it ?
• Direct hardware manipulation
• Access to specialized processor instructions
• Performance and efficiency
• Speed optimization
• Control the code behavior

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 Disadvantages ☹
• Hard and tedious
• Bug-prone
• Non-portable(machine dependent)
• Difficult to debug

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 A question ?
• In what kind of situations, assembly language
will be the only solution?

• An Operating System
• Drivers and communication with custom
hardware/electronics.
• An Compiler
• Optimizations
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 Definition from wiki
• An assembly language is a low-level programming
language for a computer, or other programmable
device, in which there is a very strong
(generally one-to-one) correspondence between
the language and the architecture's machine
code instructions. Each assembly language is
specific to a particular computer architecture, in
contrast to most high-level programming
languages, which are generally portable across
multiple architectures, but
require interpreting or compiling.

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 Chapter 1
Microcomputer Systems

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The Components of a Microcomputer
System
• Typical components
– System unit
– Keyboard
– Display Screen
– Disk drives
• Functionally three parts
– CPU
– Memory circuits
– I/O circuits

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 Memory
• Bytes and Words
• Bit position
• Memory operations
• RAM and ROM
• Buses

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CPU

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 I/O Ports
• Serial Ports
• Parallel Ports

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 Instruction Execution
• Fetch
– Fetch an instruction from memory
– Decode it
– Fetch data if needed
• Execute
– Perform operation on data
– Store result if needed

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 Instruction Execution
• The Process of executing an instruction
– 00000001 00000110 00000000

ADD AX Memory
operation Register Address
00000000

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 I/O Devices
• Magnetic Disks
• Keyboard
• Display Monitor
• Printers

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• What is Emulator?
• In computers an emulator is a hardware
device or a program that pretends to be
another particular device or program.
• Example : emu8086, DOSBox 0.74

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 Simulator VS Emulator
• A simulator provides a fast and easy way to
set up a software environment for application
testing purposes without mimicking actual
hardware. An emulator takes things a step
further by emulating software as well as
hardware configurations.

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Chapter 2
REPRESENTATION OF NUMBERS
AND CHARACTERS

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 Number Systems
• Binary Number System
• Hexadecimal Number System
• Decimal Number System

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Conversion Between Number Systems
• Converting Binary and Hex to Decimal
• Converting Decimal to Binary and Hex
• Conversions between Hex and Binary

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 Addition and Subtraction
• Hexadecimal Addition Table

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 How integers are represented in the
Computer
• Unsigned integers
• Signed integers
– One’s complement
– Two’s complement
• Decimal Interpretation

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 Character Representation
• ASCII ( American Standard Code for
Information Interchange) code
• Normally 128 ASCII Codes
• 32-126 are printable
• 0 to 31 and 127 for control purposes
• For Extended set, there are 256 characters

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Chapter 3
ORGANIZATION OF THE IBM
PERSONAL COMPUTERS

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 The Intel 8086 Family of
Microprocessors
• The 8086 and 8088 Microprocessors
• The 80186 and 80188 Microprocessors
• The 80286 Microprocessor
• The 80386 and 80386SX Microprocessors
• The 80486 and 80486SX Microprocessors

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 Organization of the 8086/8088
Microprocessors
• Registers
– 3 Types of registers
• Data Registers
• Address Registers
• Status Register

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 Data Registers
• AX (Accumulator Register)
• BX (Base Register)
• CX (Count Register)
• DX (Data Register)

• Each one has two parts like AX(AH+AL)

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Data Registers

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Segment Registers(Address Registers)

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Pointer and Index Registers, Instruction
pointers (Address Registers)

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 Segment Registers
• Memory Segment
• Segment: Offset Address
• Location of Segments

Task Segment Registers Pointer and Index

Registers
Code CS IP
Data DS SI
ES EI
Stack SS SP
BP
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FLAGS Register(Status Register)

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Overlapping Scenario

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• If you have a segment A4FBh and offset
4872h. Then what is the 20 bit physical
address?

A4FB0h
+4872h
-------------
A9822h ( 20 bit physical address)

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 Organization of the PC
• The Operating System
– DOS (Disk Operating System)
• BIOS (Basic Input/Output System)

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 Memory Organization of the PC
• 8086/8088 has only 1MB of memory
• Not all memory for application programs
• Interrupt Vector, Video Display Memory etc
are needed
• IBM fixed all the positions and allowed all to
live happily

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 I/O ports addresses
• Interrupt controller (20h-21h)
• Keyboard controller (60h-63h)
• etc...

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 Start-up Operation
• Boot program

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