QBasic on WINDOWS 98 or XP

[Skyler]

I just found Debug in my digital circuits class last week. It's cool.

[Ralph]

Skyler:

I have a book, called "PC Magaziane, DOS Power Tools". It is 1275 pages long. Chapter 4, starting on page 119, is all about hexadecimals, and starts using debug very quickly to produce very fast running .com programs. One such is FormFeed.com, which does just that, and is 7-bytes long! It can be called from within QuickBASIC, for instance, by using
SHELL "FormFeed"
assuming that program is in the currently-being-used folder, or dirctory. The book is loaded with all kinds of useful utilities, most with the assembly language code to use with debug.exe to create a .com file. If interested, I can post a few of these. For starters, here is the code for Debug.exe, to produce the FormFeed.com file. Once you start debug, a dash indicates that debug is waiting for you to enter something:

Code:

-N FormFeed.COM       'Name is FormFeed.COM
-RCX                            'call on Register CX to input the file's length.
CX   0000                    'CX has 0000, at present, and resonds with a
:7                                'colon, to which we answer 7, for file length
-W                               'next, we tell debug to Write the file to disk
Writing 0007 bytes     'debug reports that it is writing the 7 bytes
-Q                               'at debug's prompt, we finish with Quit

If we invoke debug, and, at debug's prompt, enter the above, we end up with the 7-byte long program, FormFeed.com. How's that?
Oh, I don't remember if we can include the comments shown, in debug.

Debug allows assembling and unassembling. To see the first 16 characters following address 100 (XXXX 0100), that is, all the characters from address 0100 to 010F (the first character will be at 0100, the second at 0101, the 16th at 010F, as th addresses are in hexadecimal notation), we start debug, and enter:
-D 100 10F 'D is the debug display command
You will see the starting address for the first line of 16 characters that are displayed per line, followed by the "English" translation. Very interesting!

Don't forget to enter Q at the debug - prompt, to Quit debug!

To see the program disassembled, or unassembled, use:
-U 100 10F

[Skyler]

I disassembled my name. I don't know what it's supposed to do though.

[Ralph]

Are you being serious? Disassembling your name! I guess this is how you did it:
S k
y
l e
r

[Skyler]

No, I changed some memory values to my name and disassembled them.

[Ralph]

We have strayed so far from the original subject for this thread, that I believe it necessary to open a new one, if we are to continue postings that are different than that subject. So, I'm out of here, and into a new one, called "Debug.exe and real small .com programs."