Hello all, let me begin by saying how utterly amazed I am by thinBasic.
Any private programming I did until recently was done on my Acorn RiscPC. That has a very extended BASIC interpreter which has a built-in assembler. And then I needed to bulk-convert half a gigabyte (oh yes) of graphics on my Windows machine.
I looked around and ended up with thinBasic. I wrote several programs in pure BASIC and was already amazed at the execution speed, but converting half a gigabyte of graphics data was impossible in pure BASIC. So I ventured into the assembler. Now, I have been programming assembler for some 25 years, starting on the trusty C64 in 6502 assembler, and the last 20 years were ARM RISC. Programming x86 is... different.
Got that conversion routine working but I will deny having anything to with that code. It's that bad.
A week ago I started on arbitrary-precision math routines and got that working on the ARM. Today I wrote the same routines in x86 assembler and I think I made better use of the x86 instruction set. But I ran into one little problem I can't seem to solve.
At the start of the main routine I perform several jumps based on an incoming parameter. But the assembler will only code short jumps, signed 8-bit displacement, and not 16-bit or 32-bit jumps. Do I need to use other mnemonics or is this impossible with the O2 assembler?
I fixed it by doing a JNE over a CALL to the routine I want. (JMP won't work either because that is also coded as a short jump.)
cmp eax,5
jne not5
call asm_div
ret
.not5
I also noticed that you can enter mnemonics in capitals except for the conditional jumps. Is that intentional or a (very small) bug?
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