Thank you very much.
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Browse All TopicsI'm learning some assembly language from a book written for the ol' 16-bit 8086. However, I'm on an AMD64 (Turion X2).
My question is: does this matter? Will this 16-bit code run on my 64-bit processor without alteration? Also, are the registers the same? Et al.
Oh, and another question: are selectors still 16-bit? Or have they also gone up?
Thank you
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by: nociPosted on 2009-09-07 at 06:42:00ID: 25274999
Eh no,
from 16 -> 32bit there were changes, from further expansion => 64bit new changes....
Check out the DOSBox, BOCHS and freedos projects. They deliver x86 (16bit capable environments).
Also if you reference a book designed for f.e. programming under MS-DOS, then a lot of assumptions in that book (Usage of registers, syscall interface, in general: the calling convention) is not valid when programming for FreeBSD, Linux, OS X etc.
If you want to use the modern processor features, use a book describing the right processor. The AMD64 is equivalent to Pentium IV enough for usermode programming.
For kernel programming first establish a base with usermode and then grab a Spec Sheet of you target processor to get to know the tiny differences.