We're not going to do your homework for you. Show you made an effort, and then you may get some help.

Google "MIPS shift left"

A common fast way to do a multiply by 8 is just shift left by 3 bits.

Define "much" ;-> In reality, its something in the range of 30% faster on average. The prefetch queue goes a long way towards flattening the performance between the two.

In the specific case of...

maybe it wants: "offset message" ?

Don't forget that DS needs to be set to the segment the message is in if this code isn't already running with DS=CS

I see no push instructions in the code you posted.

Just push DX anyway. If DH is trash, who cares?

Use DL rather than DX. The group of functions you have to be calling (you didn't say which of several possibilities you're specifying in AH) don't use DH. A MOV to DX is 3 bytes, a MOV to DL is...

Multiply by 10, add current and repeat until you're out of numbers

Assuming some input character is in AL, then doing SUB AL,'0' is the traditional way to convert '0'-'9' to 0-9

This isn't your code is it?

If you want help, maybe you should ask a question.

You can hook the NPX exception on almost anything. Its not anything that requires ring 0 interactions within an OS.

Almost all early DOS C compilers can generate hard 87 stuff or emulated 87'. Most assemblers can do it too.

Almost everything executes faster on the 8086. It has a 16 bit bus rather than the 8088's 8 bit bus.

The execution units on the two chips are identical. The only difference is bus width and...

If you use a mutant form of AAM or AAD (I forget which right now) that uses 16 as its base rather than 10, it will cleanly split the nibbles in AL into AH and AL.

IOW - 0x35 would become 0x0305

Bite me slacker. You deserve your fate.

Hint: index registers

Sounds like you should be kicked out of school if you waited till the last day to start the assignment. Sympathy is a word in the dictionary.

The OP never said that. I still can't figure out what they want.

They are it.



No difference, other than errata unless you start wanting to exploit things like 3DNow or MMX/SSE stuff. Stay with the common 8086/286/386/486/Pentium subset and they're all...

I'd write an assembler program that just printed out "Hello World" first. In doing that, you'll find you've built 70% of what that date printer does.

It might be more useful to have a hardware design that will work first...since there's probably dozens of different RTC chips and dozens of 8051 variants, and hundreds of different ways one might...

they'll throw extra hardware at it

...and when that hardware doesn't exist?

a) What CPU?

b) What OS?

c) Is this a stock GUI like Windows or X, or a roll your own project where you're doing all the graphics yourself the hard way?

I assure you the OS/2 kernel, KBD, MOU, VIO, and base drivers code was non-trivial. It was all done in assembler.

In the 1.X and GA 2.0 version the PM graphics engine was assembler as well. The...

That's why I'm reading Vista's hardware requirements are massive right?

I have more respect for your time than you do.

If you can find a copy, the Intel 386 "Operating System Writer's Guide" explains a lot of this stuff in detail.

OS/2 1.3 would run on a machine with well under 3M of memory, and the whole system shipped on about 8 or 9 1.44M diskettes (including display/printer drivers).

Its a very bold (and 100% wrong) assumption that all computer systems have an OS or one that they're CPU bound upon.

You seem to be a very GUI/desktop centric person. I assure you, there's a...

More quickly? Perhaps.

As well? No. I can beat any compiler on speed or space optimizations. One of the biggest problems with compilers is they must implement the semantics of the language. ...

take your code (or your .class file) and run it SLOWLY anywhere with a JVM ;->

Bad ideas and bad advice are always free.

What I suggested is a very brute force method

The Space Shuttle's cockpit displays/keypad processors (an IBM SP0) were programmed in assembler as was its Heads Up Display(HUD) symbology processor (Hughs A10INS processor)

All of the kernel...

Load an 8 element array of bytes with 0000001B and start rotating them until you find the combination that works.

I'll write this program for $1,000. I don't do homework for free.

Most I've taken apart with a debugger were written by amateurs and full of bugs, so that's probably a pretty accurate statement.

We had assemblers though. The SP0 wasn't all that obscure (in aerospace circles that is). Shuttle uses it, and the Navy's Harpoon missile is using them somewhere.

The DOS loader stuff isn't very...

Patches are frequently applied in machine code. NASA's procurement process for Space Shuttle flight software had the vendor providing a "signed off" image. Subsequent fixes after image sign off...

Just declare them like any other segment. What their attributes are will be diddled by protected mode code somewhere, not the assembler.

I would suggest IFDEF'ing out most of that crap and make one small piece work at a time.

The "big bang" theory of development and debugging is a very frustrating path to take.

Most compilers have a switch to compile via assembler code. GCC, MS, Borland, etc can all do it.

Every floating point printing routine I've ever worked with for x86 scales the exponent and uses the NPX(or emulator) BCD to convert the 64 bit fraction for printing.

I think you need to take a...