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1.
TASM, EDIT, DEBUG and Emu8086 Assembler Tools
1.1 Objective
TASM is one of the well known 8086 Assembler programs. This experiment will introduce you TASM, its input, and output file types. Our objective covers hands-in experience to use Notepad to create an assembler source file, TASM to assemble the a source file into an object code TLink to link an object code into an executable file. TD and Emu8086 debuggers to trace an executable file.

1.2

Introduction

Assembly language is the lowest level of symbolic programming for a computer system. It has several advantages and disadvantages over the higher level programming languages. Assembly language requires an understanding of the machine architecture, and provides huge flexibility in developing hardware/software interface programs such as interrupt service routines, and device drivers. 8086 Turbo Assembler is one of the well known assembler programs used for PC-XT and AT family computers.

1.2.1.

Editing the source file

The source for an assembly program is written into a text file with the extension -.ASM, in ASCII coding. Any ASCII text editor program can be used to write an assembly source file. We recommend to use NOTEPAD as a general purpose text editor, or the source editor of the Emu86, which is especially tailored to write 8086 Flat ASM sources for your experiments.

1.2.2.

Assembling to an object file

Once the source file is ready for assembling, you will need TASM program to be executed on the source file. TASM is a quite old program, written for DOS environment. Indeed, in most embedded system application DOS operating system is preferred over Figure 1. A typical Command Windows because Windows is unnecessary, too Window in the Windows bulky and too expensive for most embedded Environment. applications. In the Windows operating system, you can invoke a DOS command window by running the CMD.EXE executable. Figure 1 shows a Command Window, with its typical cursor. You may change the font and the colors of the Command window by the defaults and properties dialog which is opened with a left-click on the windows title. Colors such as screen text black on white, popup text blue on gray, and fonts Lucida-Console 18 point will make your command window much more readable. Whenever you want, you can use CLS command of DOS to clear the screen and the screen buffer.

Assemblers and Development Tools for 8086 and 8051 Microprocessors

The Turbo Assembler program (TASM.EXE) can be started in the command window by writing TASM <source-file-name> , and transmitting it to DOS using theENTER key. The full syntax of TASM command is:
>TASM [options] source [,object] [,listing] [,xref]

TASM command line options are shown in Table 1. Table 1. Possible Switches of the Turbo Assembler Program.
/a,/s /c /dSYM[=VAL] /e,/r /h,/? /iPATH /jCMD /kh#,/ks# /l,/la * /ml,/mx,/mu /n /p /t /w0,/w1,/w2 /w-xxx,/w+xxx /x /z /zi,/zd Alphabetic or Source-code segment ordering Generate cross-reference in listing Define symbol SYM = 0, or = value VAL Emulated or Real floating-point instructions Display this help screen Search PATH for include files Jam in an assembler directive CMD (eg. /jIDEAL) Hash table capacity #, String space capacity # Generate listing: l=normal listing, la=expanded listing Case sensitivity on symbols: ml=all, mx=globals, mu=none Suppress symbol tables in listing Check for code segment overrides in protected mode Suppress messages if successful assembly Set warning level: w0=none, w1=w2=warnings on Disable (-) or enable (+) warning xxx Include false conditionals in listing Display source line with error message Debug info: zi=full, zd=line numbers only

In DOS and Assembly programming, the names are not case-dependent, which means writing TASM FIRST, Tasm first, tasm FIRST or tasm firST does not make any difference. Assume that you have written the following simple assembly program into a text file with the name first.asm. To assemble it into first.obj file, you shall simply write the command
>tasm first

1.2.3.

Linking to an Executable or Command File

The object files contains the program code but some of the labels are still in symbolic form. A linker converts them into the executable file replacing all symbols with their corresponding values. The use of library procedures, and splitting the large programs into modules are possible since a linker can calculate a label referred from a different object file. The file first.obj is converted to an executable by the DOS command
>tlink first

Figure 2 shows typical command window message after tasm and tlink is executed.

Assemblers And Development Tools For 8086 And 8051 Microprocessors

Figure 2 Command Window after tasm and tlink are executed. After running Tlink, you shall find the executable file first.exe in your working folder. First.exe terminates with a return to DOS interrupt, without giving any message. An assembly debugging tool can trace what happens during the execution of the first.exe file.

1.2.4.

Tracing and Debugging of an EXE file

Turbo Debugger, td.exe, is an 8086 debugging tool which gives a convenient view of the CPU status, and the memory segments. The command line syntax of TD has options, program-file-name, and arguments
>TD [options] [program [arguments]] -x= turn option x off

The options of td.exe is shown in Table 2. Table 2. Command Line Options for Turbo Debugger TD.EXE
-c<file> -do,-dp,-ds -h,-? -i -k -l -m<#> -p -r -rn<L;R> -rp<#> -rs<#> -sc -sd<dir> -sm<#> -sn -vg -vn -vp -w -y<#> -ye<#> Use configuration file <file> Screen updating: do=Other display, dp=Page flip, ds=Screen swap Display this help screen Allow process id switching Allow keystroke recording Assembler startup Set heap size to # kbytes Use mouse Use remote debugging Debug on a network with local machine L and remote machine R Set COM # port for remote link Remote link speed: 1=slowest, 2=slow, 3=medium, 4=fast No case checking on symbols Source file directory <dir> Set spare symbol memory to # Kbytes (max 256Kb) Don't load symbols Complete graphics screen save 43/50 line display not allowed Enable EGA/VGA palette save Debug remote Windows program (must use -r as well) Set overlay area size in Kb Set EMS overlay area size to # 16Kb pages

Assemblers and Development Tools for 8086 and 8051 Microprocessors

Figure 3. The turbo debugger started with first.exe file. Entering the command
>td first

into the command window will start the debugger to load the executable first.exe to its memory space. The screenshot of TD is shown in Figure 3. In Turbo debugger, you can execute the instructions step by step and trace the execution of the code. Any message written to the screen will invoke the screen display mode to let you observe the message.

1.2.5.

Emu86 IDE

An Integrated Development Environment (IDE) provides a convenient environment to write a source file, assemble and link it to a -.COM or -.EXE file, and trace it in both source file, and machine code. Emu86 is an educational IDE for assembly program development. You can download the latest student version of EMU86 from the web page www.emu8086.com. It is a Windows program, and will run by dragging an -.ASM, .OBJ, -.LST, -.EXE , or -.COM file into the emu86 shortcut icon. By this action, asm or lst files will start the 8086 assembler source editor, while obj and exe files starts the disassembler and debugger units.

1.2.6.

EMU8086 Source Editor

The source editor of EMU86 is a special purpose editor which identifies the 8086 mnemonics, hexadecimal numbers and labels by different colors as seen in Figure 4.

a) b) Figure 4. a) EMU8086 Source Editor, and b) assembler status report windows.

5 The compile button on the taskbar starts assembling and linking of the source file. A report window is opened after the assembling process is completed. Figure 5 shows the emulator of 8086 which gets opened by clicking on emulate button.
Assemblers And Development Tools For 8086 And 8051 Microprocessors

Figure 5. first.exe in the emulator window of EMU8086 debugging environment Emul8086 environment contains templates to generate command and executable files. Another benefit of Emul8086 is its emulation of a complete system, including the floppy disk, memory, CPU, and I/O ports, which raises opportunity to write custom bios and boot programs together with all other coding of a system. More over, its help is quite useful even for a beginner of asm programming.

1.2.7.

EMU8086 / MASM / TASM compatibility

Syntax of emu8086 is fully compatible with all major assemblers including MASM and TASM; though some directives are unique to this assembler. 1) If required to compile using any other assembler you may need to comment out these directives, and any other directives that start with a '#' sign:
#make_bin# #make_boot# #cs=...#

etc... 2) Emu8086 ignores the ASSUME directive. manual attachment of CS:, DS:, ES: or SS: segment prefixes is preferred, and required by emu8086 when data is in segment other then DS. for example:
mov ah, [bx] mov ah, es:[bx] ; read byte from DS:BX ; read byte from ES:BX

3) emu8086 does not require to define segment when you compile segmentless COM file, however MASM and TASM may require this, for example:
name test CSEG SEGMENT ORG 100h start: MOV AL, MOV BL, XOR AL, XOR BL, XOR AL, CSEG END RET ENDS start ; code segment starts here. 5 2 BL AL BL ; some sample code...

; code segment ends here. ; stop compiler, and set entry point.

Assemblers and Development Tools for 8086 and 8051 Microprocessors

4) entry point for COM file should always be at 0100h, however in MASM and TASM you may need to manually set an entry point using END directive even if there is no way to set it to some other location. emu8086 works just fine, with or without it; however error message is generated if entry point is set but it is not 100h (the starting offset for com executable). the entry point of com files is always the first byte. 5) if you compile this code with Microsoft Assembler or with Borland Turbo Assembler, you should get test.com file (11 bytes). Right click it and select send to and emu8086. You can see that the disassembled code doesn't contain any directives and it is identical to code that emu8086 produces even without all those tricky directives. 6) emu8086 has almost 100% compatibility with other similar 16 bit assemblers. the code that is assembled by emu8086 can easily be assembled with other assemblers such as TASM or MASM, however not every code that assembles by TASM or MASM can be assembled by emu8086. 7) a template used by emu8086 to create EXE files is fully compatible with MASM and TASM. 8) The majority of EXE files produced by MASM are identical to those produced by emu8086. However, it may not be exactly the same as TASM's executables because TASM does not calculate the checksum, and has slightly different EXE file structure, but in general it produces quite the same machine code. There are several ways to encode the same machine instructions for the 8086 CPU, so generated machine code may vary when compiled on different compilers. 9) Emu8086 integrated assembler supports shorter versions of byte ptr and word ptr, these are: b. and w. For MASM and TASM you have to replace w. and w. with byte ptr and word ptr accordingly. for example:
lea bx, var1 mov word ptr [bx], 1234h ; works everywhere. mov w.[bx], 1234h ; same instruction / shorter emu8086 syntax. hlt var1 var2 db db 0 0

10) LABEL directive may not be supported by all assemblers, for example:
TEST1 LABEL BYTE ; ... LEA DX,TEST1

the above code should be replaced with this alternative construction:

TEST1: ; ... MOV DX, TEST1

the offset of TEST1 is loaded into DX register. this solutions works for the majority of leading assemblers.

Assemblers And Development Tools For 8086 And 8051 Microprocessors

1.3

Experimental Part

In this experiment you will use TASM, TLINK, and EMU8086 to generate an executable from an assembly source, and to trace the step-by-step execution of the executable in TD debugger and in EMU8086 emulator

1.3.1.

Writing a Source File

Objective: to practice writing and editing an ASCII assembly source file using notepad. Procedure: Generate a folder asm. Copy the files tasm.exe, tlink.exe, td.exe into asm folder. Generate a working folder with name exp1, and start a text file in your working folder In the explorer while folder is open - click on right button of mouse, and - select new, select text document. New Text Document.txt will be generated. - Rename it exp1.asm Now, you have an empty text file, with the name exp1.asm. Use windows-start > allprograms > accessories > notepad to open the Notepad text editor. Drag the file exp1.asm to the title-bar of the Notepad. The title will change to exp1.asm Notepad. It means that you successfully opened the file exp1.asm for editing in notepad. Write the following source program into the edit window. ------file: exp1.asm----; STUDENT NAME and SURNAME: ; STUDENT NUMBER: TITLE PROG2-2 (EXE) PURPOSE :ADD 4 WORDS OF DATA PAGE 60,132 .MODEL SMALL .STACK 64 ;--------------------------------------------------------.DATA DATA_IN DW 234DH,1DE6H,3BC7H,566AH ORG 10H SUM DW ? ;--------------------------------------------------------.CODE MAIN PROC FAR ;THIS IS THE PROGRAM ENTRY POINT MOV AX,@DATA ;load the data segment adress MOV DS,AX ;assign value to DS MOV CX,04 ;set up loop counter CX=4 MOV DI,OFFSET DATA_IN ;set up data pointer DI MOV SI,OFFSET SUM MOV BX,00 ;initialize BX ADD_LP: ADD BX,[DI] ;add contents pointed at by [DI] to BX INC DI ;increment DI twice INC DI ;to point to next word DEC CX ;decrement loop counter JNZ ADD_LP ;jump if loop counter not zero MOV SI,OFFSET SUM ; SI points SUM MOV [SI],BX ;store BX to SUM in data segment MOV AH,4CH ;set up return INT 21H ;return to DOS MAIN ENDP END MAIN ;this is the program exit point

------end of file -----Use tabs to start the mnemonics at the same column. Reporting:

Assemblers and Development Tools for 8086 and 8051 Microprocessors

Start a text file (you may use notepad ) with name exp1.txt. Fill in the following title to your text file.
CMPE 323 Experiment-1 Report. <your name surname, student number> PART1 Assembly source file

Copy-and-paste your exp1.asm into your report file.

; STUDENT NAME and SURNAME: ALI VELI ; STUDENT NUMBER: 012345 TITLE PROG2-2 (EXE) PURPOSE :ADD 4 WORDS OF DATA PAGE 60,132 .MODEL SMALL

Keep your report file in a safe place until you complete the experiment and e-mail it to the specified address.

1.3.2.

Assembling with TASM

Objective: Assembling the source file with TASM, and tracing it in TD. Procedure: You have already written the source file exp1.exe . - Organize a folder structure such as ASM folder contains files TASM.EXE, TLINK.EXE, and TD.EXE. folder exp1, which contains exp1.asm and exp1.bat. -Edit exp1.asm to contain the complete source text by copy and paste. Fill your student name and number to the first two lines. -Edit exp1.bat to have the following text lines in it.
..\tasm -l exp1 pause ..\tlink exp1 pause ..\td exp1 pause

-Click on exp1.bat to execute assembler. You will observe a DOS window opened, and tasm executed on exp1.asm, with the list option active. DOS window will pause and will allow you to read the messages generated by TASM. You will observe exp1.obj, exp1.lst, and exp1.map files generated in folder exp1. -If you press on space-bar, bat file will continue to execution, and it will execute the linker tlink on exp1.obj. Tlink will generate exp1.exe file into the exp1 folder. Batch file will pause until you press the space-bar. -Press the space-bar again to execute turbo debugger on exp1.exe file. In the debugger, you can trace the execution by executing each line of the assembly program stepwise. Reporting: In td read the hexadecimal contents of the program code exp1.exe (28 bytes), and the contents of the memory location cs:0009. Start PART2 in your report file, and fill in (as text, i.e., A3 02 etc)
PART2
B8 68 5B 8E D8 ... cs:0009 contains ....

Then open exp1.lst, which is generated by turbo assembler in a text editor (notepad). Copy-and-paste the first page of the listing into your report file
exp1.lst contains -----------------------Turbo Assembler Version 1.0 01/13/11 11:32:32 EXP1.ASM 1 2 3 4 0000 Page 1 ; STUDENT NAME and SURNAME: ; STUDENT NUMBER: .MODEL SMALL

Assemblers And Development Tools For 8086 And 8051 Microprocessors

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 0000 0000 0000 234D 1DE6 3BC7 566A 0010 ???? 0012 0000 0000 B8 0000s .STACK 64 ;--------------------------------------------------------.DATA DATA_IN DW 234DH,1DE6H,3BC7H,566AH ORG 10H SUM DW ? ;--------------------------------------------------------.CODE MAIN PROC FAR ;THIS IS THE PROGRAM ENTRY POINT MOV AX,@DATA ;load the data segment address

Save your report file in a safe place until you complete the experiment and e-mail it to the specified address.

1.3.3.

Assembling with Emu8086

Objective: Assembling a source file with Emu8086 assembler/emulator Procedure: -Start Emu8086, and close the welcome window. Use open in taskbar to start the file browser. Select the folder exp1, and open exp1.asm. -Emu8086 cannot use title, page, and org directives. Put a semicolon to make them a comment line. Then, use emulate in taskbar to assemble, and start the emulator window with the exp1.exe. -Use the taskbar-button single step to execute each line of the assembly source. Reporting In PART3 of your report answer the following questions in full sentences. a) How many times the loop passes through the add instruction? b) What is the effective address of the add instruction in the code segment? After completing the experiment, write an e-mail that contains
Please find the attached report file of experiment 1. Regards. 012345 Ali Veli

attach the report file to the e-mail and send it - from your student-e-mail account - to the e-mail address [email protected] - with the subject: exp1. Late and early deliveries will have 20% discount in grading. No excuse acceptable.

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Assemblers and Development Tools for 8086 and 8051 Microprocessors