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CHAPTER 12 COMPATIBILITY WITH OTHER ASSEMBLERS I gave heavy priority to compatibility when I designed A86; a priority just a shade behind the higher priorities of reliability, speed, convenience, and power. For those of you who feel that "close, but incompatible" is like saying "a little bit pregnant", I'm sorry to report that A86 will not assemble all Intel/IBM/MASM programs, unmodified. But I do think that a vast majority of programs can, with surprisingly little massaging, be made to assemble under A86. Furthermore, the massaging can be done in such a way as to make the programs still acceptable to that old, behemoth assembler. Version 3.00 of A86 has many compatibility features not present on earlier versions. Among the features added since A86 was first released are: more general forward references, double quotes for strings, "=" as a synonym for EQU, the RADIX directive, and the COMMENT directive. If you tried feeding an old source file to a previous A86 and were dismayed by the number of error messages you got, try again: things might be more manageable now. Conversion of MASM programs to A86 Following is a list of the things you should watch out for when converting from MASM to A86: 1. You need to determine whether the program was coded as a COM program or as an EXE program. All COM programs coded for MASM will contain an ORG 100H directive somewhere before the start of the code. EXE programs will contain no such ORG, and will often contain statements that load named segments into registers. If the program was coded as EXE, you must either assemble it (using the +O option) to an OBJ file to be fed to LINK, or you must eliminate the instructions that load segment registers-- in a COM program they often aren't necessary anyway, since COM programs are started with all segment registers already pointing to the same value. A good general rule is: when it doubt, try assembling to an OBJ file. 2. You need to determine whether the program is executing with all segment registers pointing to the same value. Simple COM programs that fit into 64K will typically fall into this category. Most EXE programs, programs that use huge amounts of memory, and programs (such as memory-resident programs) that take over interrupts typically have different values in segment registers. 12-2 If there are different values in the segment registers, then there may be instructions in the program for which the old assembler generates segment override prefixes "behind your back". You will need to find such references, and generate explicit overrides for them. If there are data tables within the program itself, a CS-override is needed. If there are data structures in the stack segment not accessed via a BP- index, an SS-override is needed. If ES points to its own segment, then an ES-override is needed for accesses (other than STOS and MOVS destinations) to that segment. In the interrupt handlers to memory-resident programs, the "normal" handler is often invoked via an indirect CALL or JMP instruction that fetches the doubleword address of the normal handler from memory, where it was stored by the initialization code. That CALL or JMP often requires a CS-override-- watch out! If you want to remain compatible with the old assembler, then code the overrides by placing the segment register name, with a colon, before the memory-access operand in the instruction. If you do not need further compatibility, you can place the segment register name before the instruction mnemonic. For example: MOV AL,CS:TABLE[SI] ; if you want compatibility do this CS MOV AL,TABLE[SI] ; if not you can do it this way 2. A86 is a bit more restrictive with respect to forward references than MASM, but not as much as it used to be. You'll probably need to resolve just a few ambiguous references by appending " B" or " W" to the forward reference name. One common reference that needs a bit more recoding is the difference of two forward references, often used to refer to the size of a block of allocated memory. You handle this by defining a new symbol representing the size, using an EQU right after the block is declared, and then replacing the forward-reference difference with the size symbol. 3. A86 has the feature, not seen in MASM, that the default base for numbers with leading digit 0 is hexadecimal, not decimal. This means that you must remove any leading zeroes from decimal numbers in your old programs. Note that all constants other than those without leading zeroes and without trailing base-specifiers are handled identically by A86 and by MASM. The ONLY thing you need to worry about is decimal numbers with leading zeroes. Example: the old code line MOV AX,00100, meaning decimal 100, should be recoded MOV AX,100, without the leading zeroes. Alternatively, I have added the RADIX command, for compatibility with the .RADIX command of IBM's assembler. If the program has a .RADIX command at the top of it, then my assembler will handle constants identically to the IBM assembler; if it does not, you can add a .RADIX 10 to the top of the program, for complete compatibility. 12-3 For even greater convenience, I have added the +D switch, which you can put into your A86 environment variable, to achieve decimal functionality without a RADIX 10 command. 4. A86's macro definition and conditional assembly language is different than MASM's. Most macros can be translated by replacing the named parameters of the old macros with the dedicated names #n of the A86 macro language; and by replacing ENDM with #EM. Other constructs have straightforward translations, as illustrated by the following examples: MASM construct Equivalent A86 construct IFE expr #IF ! expr IFB <PARM3> #IF !#S3 IFNB <PARM4> #IF #S4 IFIDN <PARM1>,<CX> #IF "#1" EQ "CX" IFDIF <PARM2>,<SI> #IF "#2" NE "SI" .ERR (any undefined symbol) .ERRcond TRUE EQU 0FFFF TRUE EQU cond EXITM #EM IRP ... ENDM #RX1L ... #ER REPT 100 ...ENDM #RX1(100) ... #ER IRPC ... ENDM #CX ... #EC The last three constructs, IRP, REPT, and IRPC, usually occur within macros; but in MASM they don't have to. The A86 equivalents are valid only within macros-- if they occur in the MASM program outside of a macro, you duplicate them by defining an enclosing macro on the spot, and calling that macro once, right after it is defined. To retain compatibility, you isolate the old macro definitions in an INCLUDE file (A86 will ignore the INCLUDE directive), and isolate the A86 macro definitions in a separate file, not used in an MASM assembly of the program. 5. A86 supports the STRUC directive, with named structure elements, just like MASM, with one exception: A86 does not save initial values declared in the STRUC definition, and A86 does not allow assembly of instances of structure elements. For example, the MASM construct PAYREC STRUC PNAME DB 'no name given' PKEY DW ? ENDS PAYREC 3 DUP (?) PAYREC <'Eric',1811> 12-4 causes A86 to accept the STRUC definition, and define the structure elements PNAME and PKEY correctly; but the PAYREC initializations need to be recoded. If it isn't vital to initialize the memory with the specific definition values, you could recode the first PAYREC as: DB ((TYPE PAYREC) * 3) DUP ? If you must initialize values, you do so line by line: DB 'Eric ' DW ? If there are many such initializations, you could define a macro INIT_PAYREC containing the DB and DW lines. 6. A86 does not support a couple of the more exotic features of MASM assembly language: the RECORD directive and its associated operators WIDTH and MASK; and the usage of angle- brackets to initialize structure records. These features would have added much complication to the internal structure of symbol tables in A86; degrading the speed and the reliability of the assembler. I felt that their use was sufficiently rare that it was not worth including them for compatibility. I would like to hear some feedback on this. Does anybody out there use these features heavily? Will they be missed in A86? If your old program does use these features, you will have to re-work the areas that use them. Macros can be used to duplicate the record and structure initializations. Explicit symbol declarations can replace the usage of the WIDTH and MASK operators. Compatibility symbols recognized by A86 A86 has been programmed to ignore a variety of lines that have meaning to Intel/IBM/MASM assemblers; but which do nothing for A86. These include lines beginning with a period (except .RADIX, which is acted upon), percent sign, or dollar sign; and lines beginning with ASSUME, INCLUDE, PAGE, SUBTTL, and TITLE. If you are porting your program to A86, and you wish to retain the option of returning to the other assembler, you may leave those lines in your program. If you decide to stay with A86, you can remove those lines at your leisure. In addition, there is a class of symbols now recognized by A86 in its .OBJ mode, but still ignored in .COM mode. This includes NAME, END, and PUBLIC. Named SEGMENT and ENDS directives written for other assemblers are, of course, recognized by A86's .OBJ mode. In non-OBJ mode, A86 treats these as CODE SEGMENT directives. A special exception to this is the directive segname SEGMENT AT atvalue 12-5 which is treated by A86 as if it were the following sequence: segname EQU atvalue STRUC This will accomplish what is usually intended when SEGMENT AT is used in a program intended to be a COM file. Conversion of A86 Programs to Intel/IBM/MASM I consider this section a bit of a blasphemy, since it's a little silly to port programs from a superior assembler, to run on an inferior one. However, I myself have been motivated to do so upon occasion, when programming for a client not familiar with A86; or whose computer doesn't run A86; who therefore wants the final version to assemble on Intel's assembler. Since my assembler/debugger environment is so vastly superior to any other environment, I develop the program using my assembler, and port it to the client's environment at the end. The main key to success in following the above scenarios is to exercise supreme will power, and not use any of the wonderful language features that exist on A86, but not on MASM. This is often not easy; and I have devised some methods for porting my features to other assemblers: 1. I hate giving long sequences of PUSHes and POPs on separate lines. If the program is to be ported to a lesser assembler, then I put the following lines into a file that only A86 will see: PUSH2 EQU PUSH PUSH3 EQU PUSH POP2 EQU POP POP3 EQU POP I define macros PUSH2, PUSH3, POP2, POP3 for the lesser assembler, that PUSH or POP the appropriate number of operands. Then, everywhere in the program where I would ordinarily use A86's multiple PUSH/POP feature, I use one or more of the PUSHn/POPn mnemonics instead. 2. I refrain from using the feature of A86 whereby constants with a leading zero are default-hexadecimal. All my hex constants end with H. 3. I will usually go ahead and use my local labels L0 through L9; then at the last minute convert them to a long set of labels in sequence: Z100, Z101, Z102, etc. I take care to remove all the ">" forward reference specifiers when I make the conversion. The "Z" is used to isolate the local labels at the end of the lesser assembler's symbol table listing. This improves the quality of the final program so much that it is worth the extra effort needed to convert L0--L9's to Z100-- Zxxx's. 12-6 4. I will place declarations B EQU DS:BYTE PTR 0 and W EQU DS:WORD PTR 0 at the top of the program. Recall that A86 has a "duplicate definition" feature whereby you can EQU an already-existing symbol, as long as it is equated to the value it already has. This feature extends to the built in symbols B and W, so A86 will look at those equates and essentially ignore them. On the old assembler, the effect of the declarations is to add A86's notation to the old language. Example: B EQU DS:BYTE PTR 0 W EQU DS:WORD PTR 0 MOV AX,W[0100] ; replaces MOV AX, DS:WORD PTR 0100 MOV AL,B[BX] ; replaces MOV AL, DS:BYTE PTR [BX]