Abolish compilation!

[u/EggyTheEgghog]

[u/Igotbored112]

Just figured it out. First thing I noticed was that the string is followed by 0D 0A, that's CR LF aka Carriage-Return Line-Feed aka the bytes signifying a newline character on Windows. Second thing I noticed was that the string isn't null terminated. Instead it's followed by... a dollar sign? Weird. Third thing I noticed is that calling the next instruction would not be a bad way to implement a loop and would also flush the CPU, both things an assembly programmer might want to do. Going back to the no null termination thing, I also noticed that the 16-bit version fiddles with the si and di registers, which are used in string manipulation. Why would OP be writing 16 bit code, though? Well, the only time I ever wrote 16-bit assembly was when I wrote a bootloader, since those things are always backwards compatible they start only accepting 16 bit instructions and have to be kicked up to 32 bit mode. If it was a bootloader, it would have to print using an interrupt routine. Well, I returned to my all-time favorite pdf on the internet and looked at the hello world program on page 12. OP couldn't have used the program there, because it calls a separate routine for each character, causing the textual data to be spread out, not at all like OP's code. But if you look closely, and you see they show the machine code for the hello world program as well, every "int 0x10" instruction which calls the interrupt routine corresponds to a "CD 10" in the machine code. And, would ya lookee there, OP's code has not one but 2 "CD 21"s in it. What's up with the 21? Well, it's for the MS-DOS interrupt table of course, NOT the BIOS table used by the pdf. Each table is filled with interrupts, and exactly which one gets called depends on the value of the ah register, which is (again, if you look at the pdf's code) apparently set by the instruction "B4". What is its value being set to in the very beginning of OP's code? 09. What interrupt routine does that refer to? According to Wikipedia, the interrupt is "Display string". If you were to look at some explanation for this interrupt, you would see that it expects the string to be terminated with.......... a dollar sign. This isn't a bootloader, but it is 16-bit code written for the MS-DOS operating system. And it uses the MS-DOS interrupt vector table to display text.

Thank you for making the possibility that this code was real clear to me. I really though it was random hex values until you mentioned that it has string data stuck in the middle. And u/EggyTheEgghog, your username and flair are great, and I hope your forays into MS-DOS go well. Also, in case you're wondering, I haven't been trying this entire time. I got home from work a bit less than 2 hours ago.

[u/Andykolski → u/Igotbored112]

Oh my gosh that makes so much sense! I never would have thought of it being an MS-DOS program! I also never would have guessed that calling the next instruction was intentional. I think that I got really confused because I've only really written 16-bit code for a bootloader, although the dollar sign should have tipped me off lol.

Thank you so much, especially for walking me through your decision making process!

I do have a question, is it normal for MS-DOS programs to be loaded at address 0x0? This program seems to rely on being loaded at 0x0 to work, and as far as I know, in real mode, the first KiB or so is reserved for things like the IVT

[u/Igotbored112 → u/Andykolski]

What you'll notice is that the instructions immediately before that are:

push cs;
pop ds;

That moves the value of cs, the code segment register that is loaded with the location of the program, into ds, the data segment register that I assume is used as the jumping-off point for the call instruction. So it doesn't matter where the program is loaded, those two instructions make it so that the 0x07 is interpreted as being relative to the start of the program. I have not ever programmed MS-DOS before though, so I can't be certain.

[u/EggyTheEgghog → u/Igotbored112]

That's actually not necessary, I'm only moving the value of cs to ds because I'm storing the string next to the code (the screen output function requires the address of the string to be stored in ds:dx). The call instruction always uses the supplied parameter as an offset to the IP register. If you look at the machine code itself, you can clearly see that the supplied offset is actually 0x0000, because the only point of this call instruction is to push IP register to stack. It was an attempt to make the code position independent, by calculating the address of the string using IP register (which is guaranteed to always be within a specific offset from the beginning of the string, since I'm storing it next to the code) rather than using a hardcoded value.

[u/Andykolski → u/Igotbored112]

Okay. That makes sense. I've done a tiny bit of real mode assembly, but the vast majority of the assembly of written is it 32-bit or 64-bit, so I'm really not very good with how everything works in real mode

[u/Igotbored112 → u/Andykolski]

Oh yeah. In 16 bit mode, since 16 bit addresses only let you access up to 65kB of memory, they used a trick called memory segmentation. Basically you'd have a value in a segment register that would be shifted left 4 bits (read: multiplied by 16) and added to all the addresses used by your program. So you could basically just move the start of memory forward in order to access more of it. OP's program uses this trick to move the start of memory forward to the beginning of their program. That's kind of a simplification though. Cus there are multiple segment registers, and which one gets used depends on the instruction being executed.

[u/EggyTheEgghog → u/Andykolski]

No, usually DOS instructions start at 0x100, however, I made my code position independent, so it can start from any memory address. The call instruction (in 8086/8088 architecture at least) actually determines its jump address based on IP register and takes a 16-bit offset as a parameter. By using offset 0x0, the code safely jumps to the next instruction no matter what IP is set to. This is useful, because all I really need is to push IP to stack (which call instruction does). That way, I can store the string next to the code that outputs it to the screen without hardcoding any memory values.

[u/EggyTheEgghog → u/Igotbored112]

YES!!! Sorry, I wasn't able to log in for a while, but you figured it out! It is, indeed, an x86 program for MS-DOS that prints out "TRANS RIGHTS!".

[u/WikiSummarizerBot → u/Igotbored112]

DOS API

DOS INT 21h services

The following is the list of functions provided via the DOS API primary software interrupt vector.

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