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-
-
- SHOW87
- Copyright (c) 1988, 1989 Borland International
- All Rights Reserved
-
- SHOW87 is a memory-resident program that displays the
- entire state of an installed 8087 coprocessor chip when an
- 8087 is present. This is useful when you're debugging code
- that contains 8087 instructions.
-
- SHOW87 has two modes of installation. The default is the
- shell mode in which SHOW87 executes a DOS shell, rather
- than making itself truly resident. This allows you to
- de-install SHOW87 by typing EXIT at any DOS prompt. The
- disadvantage of the shell mode is that a second command
- processor must be invoked, which uses an extra 3,000 to
- 4,000 bytes of memory. The other installation mode is the
- resident mode, which is specified by the /R parameter.
- SHOW87 uses less memory in this mode, but cannot be
- removed. SHOW87 alone uses about 5,700 bytes of memory.
-
- Once installed, SHOW87 can be invoked at any time by
- pressing Alt-7. Invoking SHOW87 causes most of the upper
- half of the screen to display the flags, registers, and
- other information regarding the 8087. Pressing any key
- exits you from the display and restores the screen.
- Normally, you would install SHOW87 before debugging 8087
- code and then remove SHOW87 when it's no longer needed.
-
- If SHOW87 cannot properly install itself, it will display
- an error message and terminate. The most common reasons
- for such an error are insufficient memory, COMMAND.COM not
- found, or no 80x87 is detected. COMMAND.COM is only needed
- when SHOW87 is run in shell mode. SHOW87 finds the
- COMMAND.COM file by looking for the COMSPEC parameter in
- the environment (see your DOS manual).
-
- SHOW87 displays all 8087 information, including the
- instruction pointer, the operand pointer, the operation
- code; the control, status, and tag words; the precision,
- rounding, and infinity control settings; the stack top;
- the condition codes and their various interpretations; the
- exception settings and interrupt mask settings; and the
- register values.
-
- The condition code settings represent C3, C2, C1, and C0
- respectively. The Comp, Test, and Exam fields display the
- meaning of the condition codes as returned by the FCOM,
- FTST, and FXAM instructions.
-
- Register values are displayed in one of two ways. If the
- number has a tag setting of VALID, the number is displayed
- in decimal format. If the number has a tag setting of
- SPECIAL or EMPTY, a hexadecimal dump of the number is
- displayed. After the mantissa and exponent, the type of
- value (as interpreted by the FXAM instruction) is
- displayed.
-