Fun fact: Roller Coaster Tycoon was written in assembly. There was just a little bit of C code to glue the game into the Win32 API. To date, it's the only assembly program that I know which *deliberately* contains crashing. :)
Been programming for 3 years, it's amazing how Dave shows you what true mastery looks like while remaining incredible humble. Makes you think about what it really means to BE a programmer. You sir are an inspiring.
Even for a modern C++ programmer, this gives a lot of insight to how programming was in the early 90s/late 80s. The commenting work is also very good! Learned some stuff I never knew about Windows.
I don't really get what he says though. Sounds like he's swallowing half of most words. And he is so C-centric (and also windows centric) that it hurts.
@@martysh1226 Well, Linux is even more C-centric. The old Windows API structures were originally defined in Pascal in the mid 1980s, largely taken from Xerox (very much like the first Lisa/Mac systems that were also written in Pascal). That's why we still use "PASCAL" calls on the ABI-level when writing Win32 code in C/C++ (although renamed STDCALL today, iirc). However, I did this in the 1990s without thinking much in either C or Pascal. I though in terms of assembly plain and simple.
Indeed,.. if you're at 3k when doing a 4k intro you're starting to cut into the musicians part of the space so better have all graphics and effects working at that point :D , honestly though this stuff he writes would probably be far smaller if he used the crinkler linker instead.
When I wrote some assembly code in the early 90s I wouldn't have imagined that one day I'd be seeing someone's screen with 753,488,695,296 bytes of free space next to a 7,292 bytes assembly code. Also: insane assembly coding skills displayed in the 21st century.
@@alanhat5252 It's amazing how much space is out there!! Which is only in the dimensions that we know of... Mind boggling to think of how much is actually there just that we don't perceive it as being there as space! 🤯🤓
Fascinating content, and Dave’s typing sounds like white noise since it’s so fast. That’s decades of time spent at a keyboard on display. Thanks for creating this!
I also grew up in the '80s but I was in Louisiana. As you might expect, things were not great for a computer nerd during those days. I had my Commodore 64, banging out BASIC scripts, but I lacked resources or a mentor that could take me to the next level. My guidance counselors, who didn't understand computers, didn't encourage me to go down that path for a career. I literally thought you could be a scientist or work in a store. Retail is what I ended up doing for 10 years, though I was always building my own PCs. I finally broke into the IT support business and never looked back. Still can't code very well though. I wish I had focused on it more when I was young. So if you are a young person, or a parent of one, and your child shows an inclination to learn programming, by all means support them and try to encourage them to learn as much as they can.
Argentina and TRS-80 (Models I and III) for me; not mine, for some mysterious reason they allowed me to use them in a retail shop. Luckily there was some documentation for the API calls for the TRS-DOS, and it had a debugger that allowed you to to step-by-step and basic disassembling. With that and a book on Z80 I ended up reverse-engineering the operating system when I was 14 years old. Good times.
Haha, ask me, I surely needn't tell - from 8-bit pixel graphics in 320x200 to software-rasterized vector line graphics to the first textured 3D after gouraud (looking at you, TIE Fighter) - to now graphics cards that do not only do global illumination in real-time but can also do raytracing, in real-time and hardware! The past 30+ years have been a hell of a ride! Though youngster would probably look at me like "old fart syndrome" XDDD
Getting MS-DOS 'for free' yet buying DR-DOS in the States (I live in Europe) was an adventure of its own. "Programmers paradise" was the nearest shop for me.... At 5000 miles distance.
Watching Dave livecode is as relaxing as watching Bob Ross paint. I haven't done Win32 programming in over a decade, but this brought back some great memories.
Indeed, he is a machine. For a while I assumed he sped up the video, (there were some suspicious camera cuts, such as 22:30) but nope, he really does type code that fast. It looks impossible. I had to LOL several times. But he could have sped up his typing by 2% if he learned the keystroke for "delete previous word" rather than hitting the backspace character multiple times in a row.
I don't know but it looks pre recorded coding rather than live coding. The text cursor stops as he turns around to speak and also the blinking speed of that text cursor is fast (Like 2x - 3x or so). Also when he exit the nano editor, the directory is changed. I might be wrong on all these but yeah I noticed that.
@@cyberwaves I hear ya. Maybe someone with OCD can slow down the video and analyze the keystrokes, comparing them with what actually appears on screen.
@@TheNameOfJesus Did you really just use OCD as a synonym for "doing something detailed"? See, THIS is why people get annoyed at people just throwing around legitimately destructive mental health issues like OCD and lifelong, disabling neurodevelopmental diagnoses for fun.
Even in fast mode, that clicky keyboard is a very distinct sound.. I would bet it's an original IBM model M or a close cousin.. the sound still makes me jealous and wish I still had my original AT keyboard.
I love to watch a master at work, machinist, electritians, carpet layers, roofers ect. Most of this is so far over my head. the peak of my programing was a basic program to calculate the length of a bicycle spoke, took me a week. I got clear through this and hold you in awe!
I had to do two double-takes when I read the title, first thinking something must be wrong, as I was sure I’d seen this video a week ago, and then confirming I actually read the title correctly. I thought your previous video was unbelievable enough, I was shocked you could go so low in windows, having to manage so much yourself, so to turn around and do the same things in ASM, I’m speechless. It’s truly amazing to see an entire program written this way, it feels so alien to anything I’ve seen before (and in a fifth the time it takes me to get a 6502 spitting out data through a serial connector no less)! You never fail to amaze, best of all is that you explain things as you go in a way that even I can follow along with, that’s saying something.
this takes me way back.. I learned 68k assembly language to a good standard using a machine code monitors back in the day, I found the motorola cpu is a real joy to work with compared to the 6510 from the c64, there was no internet to speak of back then, interaction with others was done via voice over the phone or in a message base on a BBS, back then I ran a 3 node BBS which contained amongst other things a pretty active coding conference, it was the Seka assembler, that I used for a few years before DevPac came out.. comparing Seka to DevPac is like comparing the original vi to nano, but it was using Seka where I leaned concepts such as self modifying code and can remember how blown away I was at the time when I was able to see the changes while stepping through the code as it executed... good times fond memories
Im doing an education as Application Developer specialized on application development and im always impressed when someone writes in Assembly or still uses "old" languages. Keep it up!
I have been a programming since this guy the 1970s ( I was maybe 14 when I first wrote some code,) and watching this guy bang out assembler code like he was typing an email is humbling :)
I remember a pretty "big" collection of assembly widgets that didn't do much but were very amusing. The zip was found on most software repositories and it was out there to show what you could do with some seriously small bits of code. This was right before the big software bloat era.
Started a computer science course in 1966. At BU it was simply called programming, we used Dartmouth Timeshare BASIC. In my career the most sophisticated language I ever used was Pascal, GUI programming scared me. Recently, after retirement, I bought a few Raspberry PIs and learned Python. When I was at Digital Equipment Corp I taught their machine code and assembly language. All this has no value unless I want to start a TH-cam channel. I love your videos Dave, they bring back a lot of memories. BTW, my daughter was diagnosed with Autism but after years a tests it turned out to be CVI and I'm glad to say she's one of the few that has almost completely adapted out of the worst of it.
I Purchased a copy of MASM back in the early 80's, when software still came with BOUND MANUALS. I'll never forget just how much fun it was learning not only how to program in that language, but finally understanding just how Pascal, BASIC and C could be linked to your assembly language functions, and how the different call mechanisms worked, parameter passing, etc. I think my time programming in assembler was some of the most important in my programming career. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in how computers actually WORK, rather than how to make cool programs! Being 56 now, those days are far behind me, but I still cherish them! What an adventure it was :-}
It is actually scary to see this video and think "oh, looks like he is just speeding it up a bit." But then you look at the webcam and realize he is really typing this fast. This man would dominate typeracer
13:42 Based on the speed of the video here it looks like most of the video is actually sped up a bit but it’s all no less impressive and this video and channel are awesome.
I too think that it's sped up. The audio filter gives the keyboard an incredibly cheap sound. Dave is most probably a "real kayboard" user. No cheap membrane KBs, but a mechanical ones, or at least one with high-end membrane switches. Still impressive, tho.
@@achtsekundenfurz7876 It's real time. If you look at the RGB lighting in the background and compare it's speed during typing with Dave's explanations the light motion is the same. Snappy digit man.
@@achtsekundenfurz7876 It is sped up. I love Dave's videos, and he is brilliant and quick I'm certain, but the typing is in fact too fast to be realistic if you look at it. Besides the proof is at 16:56 for anyone who doubts this. At 17:03 it resumes warp drive. He probably put that in there to see if anyone would catch it! I give the guy full props. I'll bet he was good with practical jokes around the office in his day. His videos are great!
I started with the 8080a - in machine language and can still remember most of the codes! 40-7F were reg moves ,b,c,d,e,h,l,m,a etc 21 00 00 (ld hl,0) and a whole bunch of others. Working for IBM in the UK I wrote DOS device drivers for various Production line control cards. and a huge amount of assembly code. Your video took me back more than a few years!
Found you Dave!! Thanks for Sharing! 47yo here, I tried to code as ä teen.... Star Trek game in Basic.. it had an error that I never found... I want to go back and try again! Thanks again for sharing your history & example in ASM coding. You really inspire me! I've been in the military for the past 26yrs, and was isolated. Now retired, out in the wild, ready to pursue my passions!
Loved this! Brought back memories of my machine language work in 8080 in the mid-'70s. I couldn't afford an "OS" after building the IMSAI, so a friend gave me a copy of his Altair basic. I wrote a machine language program to search for the input instructions, as the IMSAI could be loaded from the front panel, find the input/output commands, and then I wrote a jump to my input/output to my devices (Altair basic was loaded with my homemade "Tarbell" tape interface). When I finally acquired an 'assembler' for the 8080 I thought I had died and gone to heaven! The best program I ever wrote on the IMSAI/8080 was a "BAUDOT to ASCII" converter so I could use ASCII on ham radio RTTY. (Today ASCII is ok on ham radio, but not back then! ) - And to think we had 1K boards back then plugged into our S-100 bus! Fun Stuff! BTW< who else do you know who started their career with Western Union as a teletype tech and finished (retired) with Cisco Systems !!
How I wanted an altair in 1975. Looked like those movie computers till I discovered a "computer store" by accident. The owner convinced me to get a SWTPC6800 with two buttons ON-OFF / RESET instead of flipping switches just to read a keyboard, to type code to read a cassette tape program etc. The swtpc6800 used a "BIOS" called MIKBUG which had code to read a serial keyboard, display to a serial monitor, load and save a program from and to a serial cassette tape machine, enter an address and type machine code in hex. I thought "who needs blisters on their fingers" suffered by many an altair user.
Assembly was still part of my apprenticeship in 2005, and we weren't allowed to progress to C until we were reasonably adept at writing simple programs for the Z80 and C51. Unfortunately, I never got to use ASM again. This Video might change that :)
I did computer science at 17 and we spent a couple of months doing hand written binary arithmetic, not sure I ever used it, but gave me an appreciation of what's actually happening
You make that look so easy, the flood of memories from my windows 2.X days reminded me that nothing was easy back then. You had to really work for performance. Great demonstration of an ancient art, definitely a "Bob Ross" moment.
Just found this channel. I have to say this now in my top 5 favorite channels to view. I see a flight full of downloaded Dave's videos. Well done sir. Glad to see we old nerds are still makin' it happen. This is also a great stroll down memory lane to coding in the 80's. Cheers
When I was in high school in the early 90s, one of my friends was writing programs in assembly. I thought I was nerdy until he started doing this. LOL. He would have gone far in life if he hadn't self deleted 2 days before graduation. He was a good friend and I still think about him to this day 30 years later.
it's rare to see such quality content thisese days, and it's even more awesome he speaks about things we today think of as the dark magic of compilers and frameworks and dont care about. keep this awesome content coming
I did my Master's in computer science, graduating in 2020, and I had to do some pretty extensive assembly language programming for both of the computer architecture classes I had to take. The plot twist, though: neither of them was x86 assembly. One was a toy processor that only exists as a virtual machine, and the other was RISC V. It was more to understand how CPUs work and what your C (or whatever) code ultimately becomes, rather than because we were really expected to program assembly in the real world.
I absolutely love these videos. I know there's an infinitesimally small chance that what I learned from this video will be used directly, but its still great knowledge. Learning low level information on how to interact with the native APIs is something you don't see very often, and I'm enjoying it a ton. I will admit, these videos strike a perfect balance between description and achieving an outcome, while I don't always understand perfectly whats going on, I understand enough of it to make sense of what I don't and you reach the goal in 1 video! That's impressive. Anyways, see you next time!
A significant portion of the 4k file size is just image section alignment. If you use a linker which allows you to cut that out, you can get your program down to 1,640 bytes without changing a single byte of the source file. Here is the commands I used: \masm32\bin\ml.exe /c HelloAssembly.asm \masm32\bin\polink.exe /SUBSYSTEM:WINDOWS /ALIGN:4 HelloAssembly.obj Of that 1,640 bytes, 456 are the DOS Header, DOS stub, NT Headers, and COFF section headers. You can shrink these, but its not as trivial as shrinking the section alignment.
You could . . . -- make the DOS program just quit without a message if the exe is run on a DOS system -- remove COFF info (it's debug data) -- initialize ALL data (if the uninitialized data are only a few bytes, the extra distinction might use more bytes than simply setting those data to 00000000) -- use test eax,eax instead of cmp eax,0 (save 3 bytes, because the 0 is a 32-bit constant in the code segment) -- call standard APIs via ordinal where standardized: some APIs have long names, but the ordinals are 16-bit numbers IIRC, so instead of referencing a string of ~15 bytes, you provide a single word (or DWORD at worst) number to select te subroutine you want (not sure if that optimization is 100% legal tho) And there are definitely some smaller Windows exes; there's a 4k demoscene for contemporary Windows and even a *1k* competition on many demoparties. BUT those are hardly _full featured_ Windows apps. They merely roll a gfx demo and quit. Still VERY impressive. Google _youtube rgba elevated_ for a 4k compo winner.
I know what you mean. Having coded in ASM half of my life and experiencing the freedom, performance and lack of restrictions, after several minutes of of developing a web frontend I start swearing, cursing profiously and pounding my fist on the keyboard. Just yesterday, I became livid when I was writing a simple HTML5 upload widget, when it turned out that it is possible to select files or folders and upload them ...but it is NOT POSSIBLE to select BOTH files and folders and upload them. Who makes this shit up!
same. i'm still at university so i have no job yet but that really makes me think if IT it the thing for me. dont get me wrong i dont want to do anything else... but man... my brain isnt smart enough and its a shame
After the Tandy TRS-80 Color II (Trash-80) in 1985, Finally got a 386SX with DOS 5 in the mid-90s. Moved on to DOS 6.22. And then to Linux and FreeBSD in 1999. Dave, I forgive you for working for micro$0ft. And I greatly appreciate your current contributions to the free world. I've worked in IT support, Data Centers, and field work for the last 21 years. Cheers!
I love you videos Dave. I was born in 2001 and I've always been interested in computers and how they work, but so much of how computers really work is abstracted away and hidden from us now a days. I think this leaves my generation of software developers with a more shallow understanding of what we're actually doing. Creating a windows application in assembly that draws a window was something I didn't think was possible but have always been curious about. This video has scratched an itch I've had for an extremely long time. Thank you!
I remember when we were writing some simple assembly programs and for some reason we were getting segfaults. We'd do everything according to the lab steps but when the program reached printf call, it'd just crash. We noticed if we just decide to push something else onto the stack it'd work, and if we pushed 1 more it wouldn't work, and 1 more push and it would work again. At some point I googled the instruction the program was segfaulting on and saw something about "stack alignment" and put two and two together and realized what was going on. Anyway, professor did not anticipate that the stack alignment would become an issue. There were some instructions inside that required 16 byte alignment, and with our 3 pushes to stack, we were just 1 quadword short of that. Perhaps in older systems the implementation was different.
I must say I really love seeing you use GNU nano! So many people tout the usefulness of editors like Vi/Vim etc but to be honest, sometimes the simplest of tools are the best!
Its quite funny what you actually remember. We are of a similar age and I wrote assembly language for the Amstrad CPC and Acorn computers. I still remember that calling &BB5A prints the character who's code is in the accumulator BUT I can't remember what I had for breakfast .........
Call 0a7fH Prints the character code in the accumulator on the Trs-80 Models I, II, III & IV. Maybe their color computer as well but that one I never used.
Once upon a time there was a company (I believe) called 'Base Two' or maybe 'Phase Two' (I still have the disks around here somewhere). They produced an enormous library of x86 assembly macros which were really amazing, wide ranging, and simple to integrate into your own code. They were so well laid out that it actually helped with code design. I really miss coding with those. Sigh. Made x86 assembly coding fun instead of a slog.
And they went out of business. The end. Well, yeah, I agree, though. A well thought out assembly library is a great tool. You also have a point about the slog. "The slog" has been created, in my opinion, by two effects: everything that is server centric requires an incredible amount of plumbing over leaky pipes (many of which contain mostly sewage and deliberately toxic substances) and everybody wants to log the movements of the little toes of the user because they are worth a billion dollars (or so the advertising industry claims). So the same business process that once could be done with 16k of assembly on an eight bit CPU now requires a GByte of frontend, middleware and backend code. Use OOP in addition and you are up to 10GBytes. :-)
Dave needs to make a video of himself getting the assembly dump from a complete Ubuntu Linux distro on different architectures. I'd love to see what the filesystem looks like in various assembly architectures
The most edifying aspect of this exercise is the way Dave shows you how to diligently document your source code: one line at a time, code on the left, comments on the right. C++ programmers, take heed, you may not have a convenient comment tab to neatly line up your comments in a column, but you can still use the right side of your text page to document your code.
Oh the memories you brought back to this 73 yr old nerd. Started with assembler cutting my eye teeth with MASM. Enjoy your channel immensely Thanks Dave for another walk down memory lane.
I took a class in x86 assembly when I was working on my Comp Sci field of study certificate, and I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. I mentioned this on the day of the final while we were waiting for the instructor, and everyone looked at me as if I should have been in a strait jacket and a padded room. 😅
I'm not a Coder, although I do recall entering machine code into a Motorola microcontroller half a century ago. What fascinates me is how steeped Dave is in Microsoftness. He uses 'dll' as if it were the very bread of life. He provides an insight into the MS religion, the opaqueness, the special handshakes and implicit nods. How somehow, we should all know - 'this is the way'.
I'm glad I'm not the only one that hand-wrote assembly. I started learning Z80 assembler at the age of 11 on an Amstrad CPC and couldn't afford an assembler so ended up writing all my code in assembly and assembling it to machine code by hand and poking it in to memory from a BASIC program. Later, when I got an old 8088 based PC I wrote a Z80 cross-compiler for it in Pascal as a computer studies project. Happy, happy days!
Oh god this brings back some not so fond memories of writing for my IBM XT Segments:Offsets the 16 bit days Oh and the 8 bit days Z-80 on my TRS-80 Model 1 I like the Bloopers!
It's a recommended practice in the x86 programming manuals from Intel and AMD: the register should be zero-initialised through the XOR operation with itself, rather than moving a zero into the register.
@@ruperttoncic9926 Yup, optimisation is a really powerful practice that's often overlooked these days. 8088 Corruption and 8088 Domination are enough proof of this.
@@shalinpather4198Z80 was the way forward! Back in the day... Wrote half of Space Invaders in less than 2K - I say half as I never had the time to finish it!
Same here - I used Turbo Pascal inline assembly to access and display file/directory info., and perform other low-level functions. Borland was at its peak during those times.
"Turbo Pascal" - I haven't heard that spoken in years! I loved my Turbo Pascal. Only generated ___.com files that were minimum 10 K long, but the Integrated Development Environment was so clean. Easy to run and and then compile.
@@christopherknee5756 In college all I needed to write code was contained on a 3-1/2 inch floppy 💾 disk, which contained the entire Turbo Pascal Compiler and my source code/output files. No need for a Terabyte hard drive back in those simpler times! Also used the inline assembly feature to interact with the DOS-based file system and perform tricks like displaying the time in the program's execution.
As for executables smaller than 3kb: MattKC wrote the game snake and got it down to 3.12kb; with packing he got the exe down to 1478 Bytes to store the whole game in a QR code (Video: "Can you fit a whole game into a QR Code?) And then there is the Demo scene where 1KB demos are their own category. e.g. "untraceable" by TBC
The main blocker for tiny executables is the windows loader validator. It used to be that you could squash the actual code bytes into unused fields in the new PE header, and the new PE header child overlap with the DOS header. Ah, those were the days. Now you can't get smaller than the 0x200 (IIRC) minimum section alignment so I believe the smallest exe is simply that plus a one byte RET instruction that exits with 0. You can play games with instructions overlapping your import table if you're really playing with fire for actually useful exes, though!
I just want to say how happy I am that I stumbled onto Dave's Garage. His friendly cool persona is a breath of fresh air from a lot of other over-the-top YT personalities. I just like to listen to his videos while I'm working on coding. It's like having a good friend in the room at all times. Thanks for everything you do, Dave, I appreciate your content more than you will ever know. Keep up the good work!
I also wrote a great deal of assembly and C for x86 including real-time schedulers (pseudo OS) for several systems. I also had to do some Z80 patching where we jumped to the end, patched in some instructions, and jumped back. Watching you do this was like stepping back in time. I enjoyed it immensely.
Thanks Dave, another great video. I spent some of my early career developing in IBM 360/370 Assembly so it was very interesting for me to see the comparison.
I never managed to write 360 assembler code. The only reference source available to me (the IBM manual) carefully avoided any reference to I/O. However it did let me figure out a bit of what had happened in a core dump.
I love assembly . Started back in 1996 for 8-bit 6502 but never had time to go to the x86. Now im catching up. Cake work.... What I love the most is - SPEEEED, full hardver control, SMALL and apps. John from Serbia
Two victories for you today Dave, that's the smallest windows app I've ever seen and the fastest I've ever hit Like and Subscribe. Congrats from an old C programmer who was also forged in the glorious and brutal 80s. :)
If a computer is doing it it's doing it in machine code which translates directly into Assembly language so yes, you can call into DLLs from Assembly language. The actual code for doing it is in the _include_ files listed at the beginning. They're human-readable so you can go see what's going on if you're interested.
6502 machine language warms my heart! Got my start on a KIM-1 back around 1978. I haven't done much in assembly (or any meaningful programing) in over 30 years but when I pick up the books it all comes back. Writing code by hand on a yellow pad in assembly then translating to machine code and putting it in using that little keypad sure taught me to not make a mistake. I learned to be frugal with RAM and to this day am shocked at the size of apps but can still hear Bill Gates saying "hardware is cheap". Well back then it wasn't when RAM was $100 per K as it cost me $400 for my first 1K expansion board for my KIM-1 which was a lot of money back then. Good times!
Lol that background music is wonderful! Not even being sarcastic, it’s like “just relax as we do something that will cause most people nothing but misery and pain”
hi, I like the circuits related topic and how to turn them into assembly. I think intel give too much choices in the x86. I have to much way to finish the same task, but I like a more compact size assembly code with hardware transactions enabled, but now I'm doing other things. watching u code is also a good thing.😎
Hello Dave, I thought I 'd better pay my dues and thank you for your generous offerings. I am an old electronics enthusiast from back in the thermionics days. My first computer was a CoCo64. I quickly discovered that Basic did not get me very far so Assembler was the answer. I loved it. I have not programmed since about 1996 and that was on the 486. I am really pleased to have discovered your clips and am inclined to dust off the old assembler again and see where it can take me in this jungle of languages. Thanks again.
Watching Dave is like listening to the jazz music in the background... I kinda know what's going on, it's all happening so fast, it's all so intricate, and I'm enjoying myself
Suggestion for next video: “Learn how to code like Dave”- aka “How I learned to stop worrying about dependencies and type at 300 bauds!” Seriously, love the throwbacks to my own programming adolescence. Thank you.
I like how calm and collected he is. Complete in tune with his emotions. I assume he had done several rehearsals but it still amazes me how he codes straight forward.
I'm of that certain age, but 6502 is not burnt into my synapses. Why? Because I used Motorola 6802, similar but with some important differences (one of them made me waste two weeks trying to find a bug in the first and only program I wrote for 6502... that bug would not be such in 6802).
@@Jeff-xy7fv The owner's manual for that thing is legendary. Every bit, nibble and byte accounted for in exquisite detail. The alternate characters on the keyboard, the ability to obfuscate BASIC code by changing font colors to match the background or place special backspace characters in the code. I still have mine, including my log book containing the tape counters as to where my apps are. The C64 was an incredible computer and still to this day my favorite computer EVER. Only a Raspberry Pi is as much fun to own and use.
Watching you program brought back memories of banging away at my keyboard all night long coding ASM for the 6502 and 8088. The late 70's - 80's were such an amazing time to be obsessed with computers, every day brought something new and wonderful to learn and play around with :-)
It was interesting to see you use "xor eax, eax" to zero out the register. Back when 16-bit ruled the world, compilers would use "sub ax, ax" to accomplish the same thing. I'd see code snippets from Dr. Watson, usually in conjunction with a "NULL pointer assignment", show code snippets like that. Both do the same thing, but I wonder if compilers today still do it that way. Good stuff! :-)
In the IBM/360 mainframe "Principles of Operation," under the XOR instructions (XR between registers, X between a register and an indexed fullword (32 bits on a multiple of 4 boundary), and XC between character strings up to 256 bytes long), a hint was given suggesting how to swap the values of two character strings without having an intermediate memory location. Rather than coding: MVC TEMPSTRG,STRINGA STRINGA=AAA, STRINGB=BBB, TEMPSTRG=AAA MVC STRINGA,STRINGB STRINGA=BBB, STRINGB=BBB, TEMPSTRG=AAA MVC STRINGB,TEMPSTRG STRINGA=BBB, STRINGB=AAA, TEMPSTRG=AAA ... STRINGA DS CL3 INITIAL VALUE = AAA STRINGB DS CL3 INITIAL VALUE = BBB TEMPSTRG DS CL3 we can code the following: XC STRINGA,STRINGB STRINGA=(AAA XOR BBB), STRINGB=BBB XC STRINGB,STRINGA STRINGA=(AAA XOR BBB), STRINGB=(BBB XOR (AAA XOR BBB))=AAA XC STRINGA,STRINGB STRINGA=((AAA XOR BBB) XOR AAA)=BBB, STRINGB=AAA STRINGA DS CL3 INITIAL VALUE = AAA STRINGB DS CL3 INITIAL VALUE = BBB which can save allocating the TEMPSTRG variable, especially when STRINGA and STRINGB are 256 bytes long.
Hey Dave! I know you don't do much of this but, I'd love for you to do tutorials about cool old stuff like this for beginners. Like a beginner's series on x86 assembly language with an end goal of being able to make windows apps with it. Or teaching c++ with end goal of making win32 api programs like your other video
As a former developer who has been a hairdresser for the past 19 years, your videos have helped inspire me to re-learn how to code just for fun. Your content is very much appreciated by me!
Dave, Just wanted to say, thank you for donating to Autism research; my brother and several close friends of mine are autistic and i cannot thank you enough. Also, thanks for the entertainment!
Fun fact: Roller Coaster Tycoon was written in assembly. There was just a little bit of C code to glue the game into the Win32 API. To date, it's the only assembly program that I know which *deliberately* contains crashing. :)
The predecessor Transport Tycoon (Deluxe) was also coded in Assembly by Chris Sawyer alone.
@@das_murks what a mad man
RCT was a very well-made game. RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic from 2016 is a great re-release for modern systems btw.
Yeah...
@@damienretro4416rollercoaster Tycoon 2 with openrct2 is a better option
Gosh, this channel is a gem
I couldn't agree more
+1 no words more.
indeed it is
I'm glad it appeared on my TH-cam recommendations. Subscribed and turned on notifications!
"As you know I wrote the Windows task manager." - That quote made me click the Subscribe button, you're one of my personal heros I never knew I had.
Unfortunately, one of my favorite programs :) - I just subbed for the same reason
@@markmorton2519 Mine too, especially with my 4gb ram in modern days... *cries*
@@markmorton2519 I prefer Process Explorer, although in 10 it has improved significantly.
The best bragging right to ever exist for humankind!
@@sophiacristina me too. But not because I only have 4GB RAM, but because I have only 2GB
Been programming for 3 years, it's amazing how Dave shows you what true mastery looks like while remaining incredible humble. Makes you think about what it really means to BE a programmer. You sir are an inspiring.
Yeah he's humble . . . but soo humble as to humblebrag !
an aspiring what?
@@slickstretch6391
My thoughts exactly!
@@gregoryshields4258 aspiring hardcore programmer
@@GeeTriestehe has everything he needs to do exactly that 🤓
Even for a modern C++ programmer, this gives a lot of insight to how programming was in the early 90s/late 80s. The commenting work is also very good! Learned some stuff I never knew about Windows.
I don't really get what he says though. Sounds like he's swallowing half of most words.
And he is so C-centric (and also windows centric) that it hurts.
@@herrbonk3635 well... why would he be talking about Mac / Linux in a video about Windows?
@@martysh1226 Well, Linux is even more C-centric. The old Windows API structures were originally defined in Pascal in the mid 1980s, largely taken from Xerox (very much like the first Lisa/Mac systems that were also written in Pascal). That's why we still use "PASCAL" calls on the ABI-level when writing Win32 code in C/C++ (although renamed STDCALL today, iirc).
However, I did this in the 1990s without thinking much in either C or Pascal. I though in terms of assembly plain and simple.
@@herrbonk3635abi of pascal it was still written in c not pascal
It's only low enough level if you've hand stitched it into rope memory as they did on the apollo flight computer. All these fancy text editors, pah!
With Covid I couldn't find any old grandmas to do my wire wrapping for me :-)
Pah! You with your fancy electricity... Why don't you try cutting brass gears by hand like they did with the Antikythera machine?
@@bokkenka With your fancy machines, bah!
Acquire an orphan, force it to be your computer.
@@williambrasky3891 You us women for that type of work.
@@DavesGarage You could make your own mask-rom though
I emailed Dave the other day about the Windows Message Pump, and he replied within 2 hours. This channel is awesome!
This makes people appreciate 4k demoscene intros even more.
That it does though they measure by source code size i believe not the executable, but i could be wrong.
@@RiversJ Yes, the restriction is on the binary, not the source code.
@@pezia Thanks for correcting me!
Indeed,.. if you're at 3k when doing a 4k intro you're starting to cut into the musicians part of the space so better have all graphics and effects working at that point :D , honestly though this stuff he writes would probably be far smaller if he used the crinkler linker instead.
When I wrote some assembly code in the early 90s I wouldn't have imagined that one day I'd be seeing someone's screen with 753,488,695,296 bytes of free space next to a 7,292 bytes assembly code. Also: insane assembly coding skills displayed in the 21st century.
It's amazing how far we've gone.
@@tetraquark2402 it's amazing how far we'll go 😱
@@tetraquark2402 amazing how much space we've wasted :-(
@@alanhat5252 this
@@alanhat5252 It's amazing how much space is out there!! Which is only in the dimensions that we know of... Mind boggling to think of how much is actually there just that we don't perceive it as being there as space! 🤯🤓
Fascinating content, and Dave’s typing sounds like white noise since it’s so fast. That’s decades of time spent at a keyboard on display. Thanks for creating this!
His speech is the same to me, a fast weak noise. His phrases are hard to decipher for an outsider.
Love the Steve Gibson call-out.
I also grew up in the '80s but I was in Louisiana. As you might expect, things were not great for a computer nerd during those days. I had my Commodore 64, banging out BASIC scripts, but I lacked resources or a mentor that could take me to the next level. My guidance counselors, who didn't understand computers, didn't encourage me to go down that path for a career. I literally thought you could be a scientist or work in a store. Retail is what I ended up doing for 10 years, though I was always building my own PCs. I finally broke into the IT support business and never looked back. Still can't code very well though. I wish I had focused on it more when I was young. So if you are a young person, or a parent of one, and your child shows an inclination to learn programming, by all means support them and try to encourage them to learn as much as they can.
Argentina and TRS-80 (Models I and III) for me; not mine, for some mysterious reason they allowed me to use them in a retail shop. Luckily there was some documentation for the API calls for the TRS-DOS, and it had a debugger that allowed you to to step-by-step and basic disassembling. With that and a book on Z80 I ended up reverse-engineering the operating system when I was 14 years old. Good times.
It's never too late
I learned assymbly recently and still learning.
Great to hear you finally found your calling!
@ozone o3 Java is a standard, but they're only teaching OOP
@ozone o3 Yes, schools and universities should teach C as a standard, even some ASM to cover lower topics
From buying MS-DOS in a Retail Box, to watching the creation of the World’s Smallest Windows App, what a time to be alive!
Ha... I feel rare and old because I put MS-DOS *into* the box. I worked on it!
@@DavesGarage Thank you, because you made my Heretic gaming days, epic.
Haha, ask me, I surely needn't tell - from 8-bit pixel graphics in 320x200 to software-rasterized vector line graphics to the first textured 3D after gouraud (looking at you, TIE Fighter) - to now graphics cards that do not only do global illumination in real-time but can also do raytracing, in real-time and hardware! The past 30+ years have been a hell of a ride! Though youngster would probably look at me like "old fart syndrome" XDDD
@@DavesGarage So it's all your fault? :). Seriously though thanks for all your great work over the years and helping make today possible!
Getting MS-DOS 'for free' yet buying DR-DOS in the States (I live in Europe) was an adventure of its own. "Programmers paradise" was the nearest shop for me.... At 5000 miles distance.
Watching Dave livecode is as relaxing as watching Bob Ross paint.
I haven't done Win32 programming in over a decade, but this brought back some great memories.
except it's not live coding
Exactly the feelings while I was watching this video.^^ Dave is the Bob Ross of coding lectures.^^ 😉😉😉😉
Come on, raw win32 was an exercise in self-mutilation only comparable to raw x/motif … hmm, I’m seeing a pattern here, or rather a … motif ?
@@unixux it was a breath of fresh air compared to Win16. SS != DS and your pointer just fangandoed into File Manager's gall bladder.
Bob DOS?!
You're a machine Dave. I've coding for 15 years and I can't still code that fast... impressive.
Indeed, he is a machine. For a while I assumed he sped up the video, (there were some suspicious camera cuts, such as 22:30) but nope, he really does type code that fast. It looks impossible. I had to LOL several times. But he could have sped up his typing by 2% if he learned the keystroke for "delete previous word" rather than hitting the backspace character multiple times in a row.
I don't know but it looks pre recorded coding rather than live coding. The text cursor stops as he turns around to speak and also the blinking speed of that text cursor is fast (Like 2x - 3x or so). Also when he exit the nano editor, the directory is changed. I might be wrong on all these but yeah I noticed that.
@@cyberwaves I hear ya. Maybe someone with OCD can slow down the video and analyze the keystrokes, comparing them with what actually appears on screen.
@@TheNameOfJesus Did you really just use OCD as a synonym for "doing something detailed"? See, THIS is why people get annoyed at people just throwing around legitimately destructive mental health issues like OCD and lifelong, disabling neurodevelopmental diagnoses for fun.
@@JustAnotherBuckyLover You are absolutely right; using a real disease as a humorous metaphor for fun is a real cancer on society. Sorry.
7:06 Dave just casually flexing his typing speed :D
The flex starts at the video title where he wrote "assembly"
Even in fast mode, that clicky keyboard is a very distinct sound.. I would bet it's an original IBM model M or a close cousin.. the sound still makes me jealous and wish I still had my original AT keyboard.
@@SteveJones172pilot I do have a model M and trust me it's not that one. Sounds like modern tactile switches.
I refuse to believe he wrote this in one pass, fixed "typos", then compiled it and got a working EXE file on the first try. That's impossible!
I confused typing noises for ASMR video for a second there.
I love to watch a master at work, machinist, electritians, carpet layers, roofers ect. Most of this is so far over my head. the peak of my programing was a basic program to calculate the length of a bicycle spoke, took me a week. I got clear through this and hold you in awe!
I had to do two double-takes when I read the title, first thinking something must be wrong, as I was sure I’d seen this video a week ago, and then confirming I actually read the title correctly.
I thought your previous video was unbelievable enough, I was shocked you could go so low in windows, having to manage so much yourself, so to turn around and do the same things in ASM, I’m speechless. It’s truly amazing to see an entire program written this way, it feels so alien to anything I’ve seen before (and in a fifth the time it takes me to get a 6502 spitting out data through a serial connector no less)!
You never fail to amaze, best of all is that you explain things as you go in a way that even I can follow along with, that’s saying something.
I coded assembly since I was a kid .. now 61 and being cool when I meet coders .. the respect fpr us oldies is huge hehe :) (x86 / 8088)
this takes me way back.. I learned 68k assembly language to a good standard using a machine code monitors back in the day, I found the motorola cpu is a real joy to work with compared to the 6510 from the c64, there was no internet to speak of back then, interaction with others was done via voice over the phone or in a message base on a BBS, back then I ran a 3 node BBS which contained amongst other things a pretty active coding conference, it was the Seka assembler, that I used for a few years before DevPac came out.. comparing Seka to DevPac is like comparing the original vi to nano, but it was using Seka where I leaned concepts such as self modifying code and can remember how blown away I was at the time when I was able to see the changes while stepping through the code as it executed... good times fond memories
Im doing an education as Application Developer specialized on application development and im always impressed when someone writes in Assembly or still uses "old" languages. Keep it up!
Assembly is still the language I love. I am now at a point I am trying to learn higher level language. I use my programs to run motors in a factory.
also for me ❤️
I love the soothing piano music in the background
Not too loud? Trying to make sure it's additive and not annoying!
@@DavesGarage Nope, sounds well mixed to me!
Perfect backdrop, agree.
@@DavesGarage maybe, 10% lower will be better
@@valdisblack1541 Nah its perfect as it is right now.
assembly now and days is a very "fun" challenge for those who want to learn low level codeing. similar like working on a limited pallet.
I have been a programming since this guy the 1970s ( I was maybe 14 when I first wrote some code,) and watching this guy bang out assembler code like he was typing an email is humbling :)
I never clicked a video faster in my life
I’m to old to code like Dave...I’d be happy to be able to type half as fast.
Great channel Dave...don’t stop.
I remember a pretty "big" collection of assembly widgets that didn't do much but were very amusing. The zip was found on most software repositories and it was out there to show what you could do with some seriously small bits of code. This was right before the big software bloat era.
Started a computer science course in 1966. At BU it was simply called programming, we used Dartmouth Timeshare BASIC. In my career the most sophisticated language I ever used was Pascal, GUI programming scared me. Recently, after retirement, I bought a few Raspberry PIs and learned Python. When I was at Digital Equipment Corp I taught their machine code and assembly language. All this has no value unless I want to start a TH-cam channel. I love your videos Dave, they bring back a lot of memories.
BTW, my daughter was diagnosed with Autism but after years a tests it turned out to be CVI and I'm glad to say she's one of the few that has almost completely adapted out of the worst of it.
I Purchased a copy of MASM back in the early 80's, when software still came with BOUND MANUALS. I'll never forget just how much fun it was learning not only how to program in that language, but finally understanding just how Pascal, BASIC and C could be linked to your assembly language functions, and how the different call mechanisms worked, parameter passing, etc. I think my time programming in assembler was some of the most important in my programming career. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in how computers actually WORK, rather than how to make cool programs!
Being 56 now, those days are far behind me, but I still cherish them! What an adventure it was :-}
keeping those algorithms happy...
It is actually scary to see this video and think "oh, looks like he is just speeding it up a bit." But then you look at the webcam and realize he is really typing this fast.
This man would dominate typeracer
It’s fast but it’s hardly uncommon.
13:42 Based on the speed of the video here it looks like most of the video is actually sped up a bit but it’s all no less impressive and this video and channel are awesome.
I too think that it's sped up. The audio filter gives the keyboard an incredibly cheap sound. Dave is most probably a "real kayboard" user. No cheap membrane KBs, but a mechanical ones, or at least one with high-end membrane switches.
Still impressive, tho.
@@achtsekundenfurz7876 It's real time. If you look at the RGB lighting in the background and compare it's speed during typing with Dave's explanations the light motion is the same. Snappy digit man.
@@achtsekundenfurz7876 It is sped up. I love Dave's videos, and he is brilliant and quick I'm certain, but the typing is in fact too fast to be realistic if you look at it. Besides the proof is at 16:56 for anyone who doubts this. At 17:03 it resumes warp drive. He probably put that in there to see if anyone would catch it! I give the guy full props. I'll bet he was good with practical jokes around the office in his day. His videos are great!
There's nothing more satisfying than building something from scratch and seeing it work! Thanks Dave!
I started with the 8080a - in machine language and can still remember most of the codes! 40-7F were reg moves ,b,c,d,e,h,l,m,a etc 21 00 00 (ld hl,0) and a whole bunch of others. Working for IBM in the UK I wrote DOS device drivers for various Production line control cards. and a huge amount of assembly code. Your video took me back more than a few years!
Found you Dave!! Thanks for Sharing! 47yo here, I tried to code as ä teen.... Star Trek game in Basic.. it had an error that I never found... I want to go back and try again!
Thanks again for sharing your history & example in ASM coding.
You really inspire me!
I've been in the military for the past 26yrs, and was isolated. Now retired, out in the wild, ready to pursue my passions!
Loved this! Brought back memories of my machine language work in 8080 in the mid-'70s. I couldn't afford an "OS" after building the IMSAI, so a friend gave me a copy of his Altair basic. I wrote a machine language program to search for the input instructions, as the IMSAI could be loaded from the front panel, find the input/output commands, and then I wrote a jump to my input/output to my devices (Altair basic was loaded with my homemade "Tarbell" tape interface). When I finally acquired an 'assembler' for the 8080 I thought I had died and gone to heaven! The best program I ever wrote on the IMSAI/8080 was a "BAUDOT to ASCII" converter so I could use ASCII on ham radio RTTY. (Today ASCII is ok on ham radio, but not back then! ) - And to think we had 1K boards back then plugged into our S-100 bus! Fun Stuff! BTW< who else do you know who started their career with Western Union as a teletype tech and finished (retired) with Cisco Systems !!
How I wanted an altair in 1975. Looked like those movie computers till I discovered a "computer store" by accident. The owner convinced me to get a SWTPC6800 with two buttons ON-OFF / RESET instead of flipping switches just to read a keyboard, to type code to read a cassette tape program etc. The swtpc6800 used a "BIOS" called MIKBUG which had code to read a serial keyboard, display to a serial monitor, load and save a program from and to a serial cassette tape machine, enter an address and type machine code in hex. I thought "who needs blisters on their fingers" suffered by many an altair user.
Assembly was still part of my apprenticeship in 2005, and we weren't allowed to progress to C until we were reasonably adept at writing simple programs for the Z80 and C51. Unfortunately, I never got to use ASM again. This Video might change that :)
I did computer science at 17 and we spent a couple of months doing hand written binary arithmetic, not sure I ever used it, but gave me an appreciation of what's actually happening
I used ASM on 8048, 8051 and then PIC micros for decades before learning C.
You make that look so easy, the flood of memories from my windows 2.X days reminded me that nothing was easy back then. You had to really work for performance. Great demonstration of an ancient art, definitely a "Bob Ross" moment.
Just found this channel. I have to say this now in my top 5 favorite channels to view. I see a flight full of downloaded Dave's videos. Well done sir. Glad to see we old nerds are still makin' it happen. This is also a great stroll down memory lane to coding in the 80's. Cheers
While being a toy program, by being bare asm it touches on so many aspects of Windows and serves as a foundation for understanding apps.
When I was in high school in the early 90s, one of my friends was writing programs in assembly. I thought I was nerdy until he started doing this. LOL. He would have gone far in life if he hadn't self deleted 2 days before graduation. He was a good friend and I still think about him to this day 30 years later.
I didn't understand until the end. That's tough to deal with; at any age.
Damn.
What was his name?
I would respectfully suggest that remains private.
Big oof, just the way this world is.
it's rare to see such quality content thisese days, and it's even more awesome he speaks about things we today think of as the dark magic of compilers and frameworks and dont care about. keep this awesome content coming
The wild wild west in coding inspired from a time way back when programmers and CPU`s spoke the same language.
Those were the days,,,,, 🙄
I did my Master's in computer science, graduating in 2020, and I had to do some pretty extensive assembly language programming for both of the computer architecture classes I had to take.
The plot twist, though: neither of them was x86 assembly. One was a toy processor that only exists as a virtual machine, and the other was RISC V.
It was more to understand how CPUs work and what your C (or whatever) code ultimately becomes, rather than because we were really expected to program assembly in the real world.
The speed and precision of writing the words is impressive, also about the asm code I'm glad I found this channel. Thanks.
Thirty years later, I learn how YOU really did it. Thanks!
I absolutely love these videos. I know there's an infinitesimally small chance that what I learned from this video will be used directly, but its still great knowledge. Learning low level information on how to interact with the native APIs is something you don't see very often, and I'm enjoying it a ton.
I will admit, these videos strike a perfect balance between description and achieving an outcome, while I don't always understand perfectly whats going on, I understand enough of it to make sense of what I don't and you reach the goal in 1 video! That's impressive.
Anyways, see you next time!
A significant portion of the 4k file size is just image section alignment. If you use a linker which allows you to cut that out, you can get your program down to 1,640 bytes without changing a single byte of the source file.
Here is the commands I used:
\masm32\bin\ml.exe /c HelloAssembly.asm
\masm32\bin\polink.exe /SUBSYSTEM:WINDOWS /ALIGN:4 HelloAssembly.obj
Of that 1,640 bytes, 456 are the DOS Header, DOS stub, NT Headers, and COFF section headers. You can shrink these, but its not as trivial as shrinking the section alignment.
Can you share more insight about shrinking these headers?
You could . . .
-- make the DOS program just quit without a message if the exe is run on a DOS system
-- remove COFF info (it's debug data)
-- initialize ALL data (if the uninitialized data are only a few bytes, the extra distinction might use more bytes than simply setting those data to 00000000)
-- use test eax,eax instead of cmp eax,0 (save 3 bytes, because the 0 is a 32-bit constant in the code segment)
-- call standard APIs via ordinal where standardized: some APIs have long names, but the ordinals are 16-bit numbers IIRC, so instead of referencing a string of ~15 bytes, you provide a single word (or DWORD at worst) number to select te subroutine you want (not sure if that optimization is 100% legal tho)
And there are definitely some smaller Windows exes; there's a 4k demoscene for contemporary Windows and even a *1k* competition on many demoparties. BUT those are hardly _full featured_ Windows apps. They merely roll a gfx demo and quit. Still VERY impressive. Google _youtube rgba elevated_ for a 4k compo winner.
As a frontend web developer, watching this makes me want to go home and rethink my life.
I know what you mean. Having coded in ASM half of my life and experiencing the freedom, performance and lack of restrictions, after several minutes of of developing a web frontend I start swearing, cursing profiously and pounding my fist on the keyboard. Just yesterday, I became livid when I was writing a simple HTML5 upload widget, when it turned out that it is possible to select files or folders and upload them ...but it is NOT POSSIBLE to select BOTH files and folders and upload them. Who makes this shit up!
same. i'm still at university so i have no job yet but that really makes me think if IT it the thing for me. dont get me wrong i dont want to do anything else... but man... my brain isnt smart enough and its a shame
@@amciaapple1654The realest thing I’ve read in a while, although I do most of my programming in C rather than ASM.
After the Tandy TRS-80 Color II (Trash-80) in 1985, Finally got a 386SX with DOS 5 in the mid-90s. Moved on to DOS 6.22. And then to Linux and FreeBSD in 1999. Dave, I forgive you for working for micro$0ft. And I greatly appreciate your current contributions to the free world. I've worked in IT support, Data Centers, and field work for the last 21 years. Cheers!
I love you videos Dave. I was born in 2001 and I've always been interested in computers and how they work, but so much of how computers really work is abstracted away and hidden from us now a days. I think this leaves my generation of software developers with a more shallow understanding of what we're actually doing.
Creating a windows application in assembly that draws a window was something I didn't think was possible but have always been curious about. This video has scratched an itch I've had for an extremely long time. Thank you!
I remember when we were writing some simple assembly programs and for some reason we were getting segfaults. We'd do everything according to the lab steps but when the program reached printf call, it'd just crash.
We noticed if we just decide to push something else onto the stack it'd work, and if we pushed 1 more it wouldn't work, and 1 more push and it would work again. At some point I googled the instruction the program was segfaulting on and saw something about "stack alignment" and put two and two together and realized what was going on.
Anyway, professor did not anticipate that the stack alignment would become an issue. There were some instructions inside that required 16 byte alignment, and with our 3 pushes to stack, we were just 1 quadword short of that. Perhaps in older systems the implementation was different.
I must say I really love seeing you use GNU nano! So many people tout the usefulness of editors like Vi/Vim etc but to be honest, sometimes the simplest of tools are the best!
Hurts me when he doesn't have syntax coloring enabled, though. Nano is much better than most people give it credit for.
@@GothAlice I agree.
Its quite funny what you actually remember. We are of a similar age and I wrote assembly language for the Amstrad CPC and Acorn computers. I still remember that calling &BB5A prints the character who's code is in the accumulator BUT I can't remember what I had for breakfast .........
Call 0a7fH
Prints the character code in the accumulator on the Trs-80 Models I, II, III & IV.
Maybe their color computer as well but that one I never used.
@@jeremiahlyleseditor437 The problem with modern computers is that you can't know it all whereas with all machines you could know most of it
love it, the nano editor use. back then when i used windows nt the task manager was probably the only application that behaved as it should.
I love this, I was a spaggetti basic nerd back in the day and these videos bring back so many memories of life before mice
Once upon a time there was a company (I believe) called 'Base Two' or maybe 'Phase Two' (I still have the disks around here somewhere). They produced an enormous library of x86 assembly macros which were really amazing, wide ranging, and simple to integrate into your own code. They were so well laid out that it actually helped with code design. I really miss coding with those. Sigh. Made x86 assembly coding fun instead of a slog.
And they went out of business. The end. Well, yeah, I agree, though. A well thought out assembly library is a great tool. You also have a point about the slog. "The slog" has been created, in my opinion, by two effects: everything that is server centric requires an incredible amount of plumbing over leaky pipes (many of which contain mostly sewage and deliberately toxic substances) and everybody wants to log the movements of the little toes of the user because they are worth a billion dollars (or so the advertising industry claims). So the same business process that once could be done with 16k of assembly on an eight bit CPU now requires a GByte of frontend, middleware and backend code. Use OOP in addition and you are up to 10GBytes. :-)
Dave needs to make an episode of himself porting reversi from windows 1.0 to windows 11 just so we all can see his thought process in such a task
Dave needs to make a video of himself getting the assembly dump from a complete Ubuntu Linux distro on different architectures. I'd love to see what the filesystem looks like in various assembly architectures
The most edifying aspect of this exercise is the way Dave shows you how to diligently document your source code: one line at a time, code on the left, comments on the right. C++ programmers, take heed, you may not have a convenient comment tab to neatly line up your comments in a column, but you can still use the right side of your text page to document your code.
Oh the memories you brought back to this 73 yr old nerd. Started with assembler cutting my eye teeth with MASM. Enjoy your channel immensely Thanks Dave for another walk down memory lane.
I took a class in x86 assembly when I was working on my Comp Sci field of study certificate, and I actually enjoyed it quite a bit.
I mentioned this on the day of the final while we were waiting for the instructor, and everyone looked at me as if I should have been in a strait jacket and a padded room. 😅
I'm not a Coder, although I do recall entering machine code into a Motorola microcontroller half a century ago. What fascinates me is how steeped Dave is in Microsoftness. He uses 'dll' as if it were the very bread of life. He provides an insight into the MS religion, the opaqueness, the special handshakes and implicit nods. How somehow, we should all know - 'this is the way'.
I still don't know whats happening but i can't stop watching
I had no clue you wrote task manager, you’re now officially my hero
I'm glad I'm not the only one that hand-wrote assembly. I started learning Z80 assembler at the age of 11 on an Amstrad CPC and couldn't afford an assembler so ended up writing all my code in assembly and assembling it to machine code by hand and poking it in to memory from a BASIC program. Later, when I got an old 8088 based PC I wrote a Z80 cross-compiler for it in Pascal as a computer studies project. Happy, happy days!
Oh god this brings back some not so fond memories of writing for my IBM XT Segments:Offsets the 16 bit days Oh and the 8 bit days Z-80 on my TRS-80 Model 1 I like the Bloopers!
I love Dave's observation that xor-ing out the contents of the register is "a tad more efficient" than writing zero to it!
It's a recommended practice in the x86 programming manuals from Intel and AMD: the register should be zero-initialised through the XOR operation with itself, rather than moving a zero into the register.
This cuts out the memory fetch cycle(s) on all processors. Every little helps...
@@ruperttoncic9926 Yup, optimisation is a really powerful practice that's often overlooked these days. 8088 Corruption and 8088 Domination are enough proof of this.
@@shalinpather4198Z80 was the way forward! Back in the day... Wrote half of Space Invaders in less than 2K - I say half as I never had the time to finish it!
@@ruperttoncic9926 Yup, sounds pretty cool! Less than 2K today sounds like a godly achievement.
I used to love that Turbo Pascal allowed inline assembly - used it when writing a texture mapping routine back in the day.
And that you can do 32 bit asm inline by prefixing each instruction with db 066h. Joys!!
Same here - I used Turbo Pascal inline assembly to access and display file/directory info., and perform other low-level functions. Borland was at its peak during those times.
"Turbo Pascal" - I haven't heard that spoken in years! I loved my Turbo Pascal. Only generated ___.com files that were minimum 10 K long, but the Integrated Development Environment was so clean. Easy to run and and then compile.
@@christopherknee5756 In college all I needed to write code was contained on a 3-1/2 inch floppy 💾 disk, which contained the entire Turbo Pascal Compiler and my source code/output files. No need for a Terabyte hard drive back in those simpler times! Also used the inline assembly feature to interact with the DOS-based file system and perform tricks like displaying the time in the program's execution.
As for executables smaller than 3kb: MattKC wrote the game snake and got it down to 3.12kb; with packing he got the exe down to 1478 Bytes to store the whole game in a QR code (Video: "Can you fit a whole game into a QR Code?)
And then there is the Demo scene where 1KB demos are their own category. e.g. "untraceable" by TBC
True; however he technically did cheat.
@@HisVirusness it's not cheating if it works!
The main blocker for tiny executables is the windows loader validator. It used to be that you could squash the actual code bytes into unused fields in the new PE header, and the new PE header child overlap with the DOS header. Ah, those were the days.
Now you can't get smaller than the 0x200 (IIRC) minimum section alignment so I believe the smallest exe is simply that plus a one byte RET instruction that exits with 0. You can play games with instructions overlapping your import table if you're really playing with fire for actually useful exes, though!
Don't forget the 512 Bytes / boot sector demo scene!
@@HisVirusness So did Dave, he used UPX too
I just want to say how happy I am that I stumbled onto Dave's Garage. His friendly cool persona is a breath of fresh air from a lot of other over-the-top YT personalities. I just like to listen to his videos while I'm working on coding. It's like having a good friend in the room at all times. Thanks for everything you do, Dave, I appreciate your content more than you will ever know. Keep up the good work!
I also wrote a great deal of assembly and C for x86 including real-time schedulers (pseudo OS) for several systems. I also had to do some Z80 patching where we jumped to the end, patched in some instructions, and jumped back. Watching you do this was like stepping back in time. I enjoyed it immensely.
Just found your channel Dave - this is gold! Love it - keep up the great work :) cheers from Brisbane, Australia
Thanks Dave, another great video. I spent some of my early career developing in IBM 360/370 Assembly so it was very interesting for me to see the comparison.
Cool! I have a video on the channel of an IBM 360 in operation!
@@DavesGarage link please...
I never managed to write 360 assembler code. The only reference source available to me (the IBM manual) carefully avoided any reference to I/O. However it did let me figure out a bit of what had happened in a core dump.
I thought the video is sped up when he was coding. But no, it is in real-time. OMG :^)
I love assembly . Started back in 1996 for 8-bit 6502 but never had time to go to the x86. Now im catching up. Cake work.... What I love the most is - SPEEEED, full hardver control, SMALL and apps. John from Serbia
Two victories for you today Dave, that's the smallest windows app I've ever seen and the fastest I've ever hit Like and Subscribe. Congrats from an old C programmer who was also forged in the glorious and brutal 80s. :)
Human words == assembly, Gobblygook == machine language. Great way to help anyone distinguish the difference and look smart to thier friends.
That is your actual typing speed? It's amazing. I didn't knew you could load libraries from assembly. Thank you for your very instructive videos ;)
I'm pretty sure it's sped up
If a computer is doing it it's doing it in machine code which translates directly into Assembly language so yes, you can call into DLLs from Assembly language.
The actual code for doing it is in the _include_ files listed at the beginning. They're human-readable so you can go see what's going on if you're interested.
6502 machine language warms my heart! Got my start on a KIM-1 back around 1978. I haven't done much in assembly (or any meaningful programing) in over 30 years but when I pick up the books it all comes back. Writing code by hand on a yellow pad in assembly then translating to machine code and putting it in using that little keypad sure taught me to not make a mistake. I learned to be frugal with RAM and to this day am shocked at the size of apps but can still hear Bill Gates saying "hardware is cheap". Well back then it wasn't when RAM was $100 per K as it cost me $400 for my first 1K expansion board for my KIM-1 which was a lot of money back then. Good times!
Boy if you saw my messy bloated code - I love watching an expert in their craft. Thanks!
Lol that background music is wonderful! Not even being sarcastic, it’s like “just relax as we do something that will cause most people nothing but misery and pain”
Yep - I don't normally listen to music while I code because I get easily distracted by most kinds of music, but I'd totally code to that.
I loved learning assembly in my CS courses. It’s great to see that you could program a Windows application using assembly even in the modern day
hi, I like the circuits related topic and how to turn them into assembly. I think intel give too much choices in the x86. I have to much way to finish the same task, but I like a more compact size assembly code with hardware transactions enabled, but now I'm doing other things. watching u code is also a good thing.😎
Mentioning Steve Gibson was genius! Cue the whole "security now" listenership coming over and subscribing!
Steve Gibson's biggest fan is Steve Gibson. ;-)
Hello Dave, I thought I 'd better pay my dues and thank you for your generous offerings. I am an old electronics enthusiast from back in the thermionics days. My first computer was a CoCo64. I quickly discovered that Basic did not get me very far so Assembler was the answer. I loved it. I have not programmed since about 1996 and that was on the 486. I am really pleased to have discovered your clips and am inclined to dust off the old assembler again and see where it can take me in this jungle of languages. Thanks again.
I don't understand anything you do but I enjoy watching because you clearly are a superior being.
"'l'll shell out" Haven't heard anyone use that phrase is loooong time.
I honestly had no clue what it meant (other than "cough up the money") until he quit nano, and now I can guess at the meaning.
28:38 My very first thought was "I need to head over to GRC and see what Steve's app sizes are."
I LOL'ed at the SG quip, and I was beginning to worry I might be the only one to get it having scrolled this far down in the comments
@@starlite528 I haven't even watched the video, saw the title and said hmmm I haven't checked out GRC in prob a decade or longer.
dave is a treasure to the programmers community
Watching Dave is like listening to the jazz music in the background... I kinda know what's going on, it's all happening so fast, it's all so intricate, and I'm enjoying myself
What memories this brings back! When the MASM manual and some Windows books were our bedside reading!
Suggestion for next video:
“Learn how to code like Dave”- aka “How I learned to stop worrying about dependencies and type at 300 bauds!”
Seriously, love the throwbacks to my own programming adolescence.
Thank you.
Still can't believe he types this fast!
I like how calm and collected he is. Complete in tune with his emotions. I assume he had done several rehearsals but it still amazes me how he codes straight forward.
@@antesmolcic4354 It's speed up
@@do0nv I don't think it's sped up. Watch 12:45, with an unbroken shot of him talking, coding, then talking.
As soon as I saw ‘A9’ instantly thought “LDA immediate mode” - if you’re of a certain age, 6502 is burnt into your synapses
...and by extension 6510, that $D021 address as well even if you don't speak ML/assembler.
Yep! It's burnt into mine. Has been since I was 12 years old and playing around with a C64.
I'm of that certain age, but 6502 is not burnt into my synapses. Why? Because I used Motorola 6802, similar but with some important differences (one of them made me waste two weeks trying to find a bug in the first and only program I wrote for 6502... that bug would not be such in 6802).
@@Jeff-xy7fv The owner's manual for that thing is legendary. Every bit, nibble and byte accounted for in exquisite detail. The alternate characters on the keyboard, the ability to obfuscate BASIC code by changing font colors to match the background or place special backspace characters in the code. I still have mine, including my log book containing the tape counters as to where my apps are. The C64 was an incredible computer and still to this day my favorite computer EVER. Only a Raspberry Pi is as much fun to own and use.
NO DISLIKES YET? I guess all the Vim users are still fast asleep. Let`s give Nano some love, guys!
There is 1 dislike already which has probably been cast by -Emacs users- Python programmers accusing him of witchcraft known as Assembly
I use Vim btw
*raging*
@@romanhredil3799 Haha, you madman! But that is in fact very true!
I'm a Python programmer but also do plenty of assembly for other things. We aren't all stuck 3 degrees north of the hardware. 🙂
There’s two now, a DOS programmer must have stopped by and noticed the include lines dragging in several K of library code.
I worked with MASM assembly back in 2013. I got really good at it too, but I don't remember a single command today. Dave, you're amazing.
Watching you program brought back memories of banging away at my keyboard all night long coding ASM for the 6502 and 8088. The late 70's - 80's were such an amazing time to be obsessed with computers, every day brought something new and wonderful to learn and play around with :-)
"are you sitting comfortably?"
*Corrects contortionist position slightly*
It was interesting to see you use "xor eax, eax" to zero out the register. Back when 16-bit ruled the world, compilers would use "sub ax, ax" to accomplish the same thing. I'd see code snippets from Dr. Watson, usually in conjunction with a "NULL pointer assignment", show code snippets like that. Both do the same thing, but I wonder if compilers today still do it that way.
Good stuff! :-)
In the IBM/360 mainframe "Principles of Operation," under the XOR instructions (XR between registers, X between a register and an indexed fullword (32 bits on a multiple of 4 boundary), and XC between character strings up to 256 bytes long), a hint was given suggesting how to swap the values of two character strings without having an intermediate memory location. Rather than coding:
MVC TEMPSTRG,STRINGA STRINGA=AAA, STRINGB=BBB, TEMPSTRG=AAA
MVC STRINGA,STRINGB STRINGA=BBB, STRINGB=BBB, TEMPSTRG=AAA
MVC STRINGB,TEMPSTRG STRINGA=BBB, STRINGB=AAA, TEMPSTRG=AAA
...
STRINGA DS CL3 INITIAL VALUE = AAA
STRINGB DS CL3 INITIAL VALUE = BBB
TEMPSTRG DS CL3
we can code the following:
XC STRINGA,STRINGB STRINGA=(AAA XOR BBB), STRINGB=BBB
XC STRINGB,STRINGA STRINGA=(AAA XOR BBB), STRINGB=(BBB XOR (AAA XOR BBB))=AAA
XC STRINGA,STRINGB STRINGA=((AAA XOR BBB) XOR AAA)=BBB, STRINGB=AAA
STRINGA DS CL3 INITIAL VALUE = AAA
STRINGB DS CL3 INITIAL VALUE = BBB
which can save allocating the TEMPSTRG variable, especially when STRINGA and STRINGB are 256 bytes long.
Hey Dave! I know you don't do much of this but, I'd love for you to do tutorials about cool old stuff like this for beginners. Like a beginner's series on x86 assembly language with an end goal of being able to make windows apps with it. Or teaching c++ with end goal of making win32 api programs like your other video
Back to basic: Nano, Assembly and ... Jazz !!! thanks Dave !
As a former developer who has been a hairdresser for the past 19 years, your videos have helped inspire me to re-learn how to code just for fun. Your content is very much appreciated by me!
Dave,
Just wanted to say, thank you for donating to Autism research; my brother and several close friends of mine are autistic and i cannot thank you enough.
Also, thanks for the entertainment!
Thank you for inventing the scientific method for improving pork products.