Learning 16-Bit

[jbullard]

Well I registered last night cause I wanted to join the great MASM club and have to say it is amazing what I have been missing out on.

My first question may sound kinda weird cause I am sure all beginners want to know "How do I make an OS?"  Well, I don't really care about how to cause I know it would take a lot more experience than what I have.  Instead, I am wondering where the best place to start is when wanting to learn 16-Bit (Real Mode) assembly.  I understand a lot of what I have already read just from my extensive programming background but have not found any place that really teaches 16-Bit assembly.  Maybe I am starting off in the wrong place and need to learn 32-Bit first, but that got really boring quick just because I have used API commands in VB and C# for so long.

I am going to wonder around some more on the forum and see what I can come up with.  Hopefully, I will be able to find something.

Thanks for any help.   :bg

Jason

[LouisStDubois]

Hi Jason,

I was told by Mr. Moshe Frankel to start with something like A86 which is free to download.  That's why I started with it.  EWW

[fafastrungen]

jbullard, I started to learn asm a few days ago and I start with Art of Assembly (http://webster.cs.ucr.edu/) where you can find excelents manuals, samples and plus.
A thing I learned is that real mode and protected is not the same right now as it was in the 80's. The segmentation's problems is a big problem when you/we start to learn asm.
I tried to avoid it becouse it's very confusing for me and reading the Intel's 80x86 Processor Information I've learned that you can access more than 1 MB directly, in one segment, so it could be interesting for you.

[ninjarider]

hey, just to let you know. I started learning the basics of assembly with art of assembly. It got boring for me because it was not true assmebly. i stuck around in 32-bit assembly for about a year or 2 and started looking at making an os which has been interesting. theres not much of a difference between 32-bit and 16-bit except its really hard to use api's.

I would suggest that if you have a strong background in dos applications written in c or c++. take a small application that you can make in c or c++ and make it using 16-bit assembly and go from there.

one thing i have learned sofar about writting my own os. its not much harder than dealing with dos. except you have to write all the procedures for just about everything.