Legacy apps in Windows/OS X was Re: Old MS-DOS & Win Software

[Patrick Finnegan]

Chuck Guzis declared on Wednesday 07 December 2005 21:32:
> On 12/7/2005 at 9:03 PM Patrick Finnegan wrote:
> >Chuck Guzis declared on Wednesday 07 December 2005 20:26:
> >> keeping things like the DAA instruction intact and supporting a
> >> bunch of do-nothing instructions like MOV DL,DL.
> >
> >FYI, that most certainly doesn't just "do nothing."  It updates the
> > flags based on the contents of the DL register, and you could do a
> > conditional jump based on the results.
>
> With all due respect, I suggest that you review your X86 instructions
> and their effect on flags.  Try running this little bit of code under
> your favorite debugger (DEBUG is fine) and have a gander at the flags
> register:
>
> xor  ax,ax
> mov dl,-1
> mov dl,dl
> int 3

I'll admit it's been a while since I've bother to do much x86 assembly, 
but I don't doubt you're right.  I think I might have been thinking more 
of "and dl, dl", which I'm pretty sure ought to update the flags.

Pretty much any assembly language has useless constructs like that, 
though, just because it makes the instruction set easier to implement 
(and sometimes, compilers easier to write).

For example, in RISC architectures, register 0 is generally fixed to read 
0.  When you would normally do stuff like:
mov  r1,r2
you can also do
mov  r0,r2
or even
mov  r0, r0
(using syntax there the matching intel syntax

> Now, if your point of view held, the condition code should show a
> nonzero negative (signed) value.  In fact, they show a zero positive
> value (i.e. the results of the XOR AX,AX).  In fact, moves, be they
> register to memory, register to register or memory to register or
> memory to memory do not affect condition code bits.  Else why have a
> nutty instruction like JCXZ? You coiuld just MOV CX,CX and jumpt on
> the zero result...

Sure there's a reason.  JCXZ is one instruction, and (probably) uses up 
less code space than the other.  You could "AND CX,CX" and do a JZ 
afterwards to do the same thing.

> >> Consider on Windows XP that you can still run the following code:
> >>
> >> 	mov	cl,9
> >> 	mov	dx,offset HWMes
> >> 	call	5
> >> 	mov	cl,0
> >> 	call	5
> >
> >Huh?  Do you mean this?
> >
> >MOV  AH, 9
> >MOV  DX, HWMes
> >INT  21h
> >MOV  AH, 0
> >INT  21h
>
> Nope, I mean what I said--try it.  

I don't have a Windows system to try it on.  I could probably find 
something running DOS (or OS/2) to try it on, assuming DEBUG is 
installed on the machine...  I vaguely remember the PCB "jump to DOS" 
vector, but never used it when I wrote code (for the same reason I never 
used an FCB to touch files.. probably just too young :).

Pat
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