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Printing to the screen without the BIOS
I know this is starting to look like a half-baked tutorial in assembly, but there's actually a reason behind my madness. Namely, solving as many problems as possible before switching to Protected mode etc. will lessen the confusion a great deal.
This example prints a string and the contents of a memory location (which is the first letter of the string in video memory). It is meant to demonstrate printing to screen in text mode without using BIOS, as well as converting hex so it can be displayed -- so we can check register and memory values.
A stack is included, but only used by call and ret.
;=====================================
; nasmw boot.asm -f bin -o boot.bin
; partcopy boot.bin 0 200 -f0
[ORG 0x7c00] ; add to offsets
xor ax, ax ; make it zero
mov ds, ax ; DS=0
mov ss, ax ; stack starts at 0
mov sp, 0x9c00 ; 2000h past code start
cld
mov ax, 0xb800 ; text video memory
mov es, ax
mov si, msg ; show text string
call sprint
mov ax, 0xb800 ; look at video mem
mov gs, ax
mov bx, 0x0000 ; 'W'=57 attrib=0F
mov ax, [gs:bx]
mov word [reg16], ax ;look at register
call printreg16
hang:
jmp hang
;----------------------
dochar: call cprint ; print one character
sprint: lodsb ; string char to AL
cmp al, 0
jne dochar ; else, we're done
add byte [ypos], 1 ;down one row
mov byte [xpos], 0 ;back to left
ret
cprint: mov ah, 0x0F ; attrib = white on black
mov cx, ax ; save char/attribute
movzx ax, byte [ypos]
mov dx, 160 ; 2 bytes (char/attrib)
mul dx ; for 80 columns
movzx bx, byte [xpos]
shl bx, 1 ; times 2 to skip attrib
mov di, 0 ; start of video memory
add di, ax ; add y offset
add di, bx ; add x offset
mov ax, cx ; restore char/attribute
stosw ; write char/attribute
add byte [xpos], 1 ; advance to right
ret
;------------------------------------
printreg16:
mov di, outstr16
mov ax, [reg16]
mov si, hexstr
mov cx, 4 ;four places
hexloop:
rol ax, 4 ;leftmost will
mov bx, ax ; become
and bx, 0x0f ; rightmost
mov bl, [si + bx];index into hexstr
mov [di], bl
inc di
dec cx
jnz hexloop
mov si, outstr16
call sprint
ret
;------------------------------------
xpos db 0
ypos db 0
hexstr db '0123456789ABCDEF'
outstr16 db '0000', 0 ;register value string
reg16 dw