I am studying with the well-known Izcelion's tutorial,I just finished 1/3 of it,so I am a noob.
I like the tutorial itself but I don't like "ADDR" and "OFFSET". So I am trying to switch to another assembler that is FASM. Now I need to translate the code in the tutorial from MASM to FASM and need your help.

There is a code like this in the tutorial,in which MASM is used.


Question(1)
I found that "HINSTANCE" is not defined in FASM. I typed just "DWORD" then I could move on,but why this?
I searched through all the INC file in the fasmw directory but I couldn't find a word "HINSTANCE", so I thought it's not defined.But is it defined somewhere else?
Or is this because the creator of FASM thought all these things(HINSTANCE,LPSTR,etc ) unnecessary and useless?(Actually I thought this useless cuz this makes things complicated for a noob like me)
Or is this because FASM is under construction?
Or am I supposed to use windows.inc of the MASM for FASM somehow? but is this possible? I typed >>include "windows.inc" , but got an error.
"include file created with l2extia.exe as they require
error : invalid argument."




Question(2), is about "LOCAL".
How should I rewrite the "LOCAL wc:WNDCLASSEX" ?
I am told "error: illegal instrucion."




Question(3),
In the tutorial, there are sections ".data" and ".data?" .
As far as I learned from examples on this site, ".data" should be like this

section ".data" data readable writeable

then how about ".data? " ?
Or is it unnecessary to make 2 sections for .data and .data? because FASM is going to automatically allocate memory cleverly? I found in an example on this site that uses a same section for intialized and unintialized data.





Question(4),
What is "format PE GUI 4.0"?
I found this in a sample.
What does this mean,expecially "4.0"?
Is this equal to ".386" or ".486" or soething ike that in the MASM?


Thanks for reading, I am stuck! plz help!

There are FASM versions somewhere. I'll look for them and edit when I find them.

EDIT: Ok, try this.

Thanks windwakr, but I can't seem to compile the sulaiman's asm.
All of the scripts cause error when compiled.


Maybe due to update of FASM itself?

Try changing to ret, those files are quite old.

BTW: Those were converted to FASM by our very own sleepsleep. Maybe he can tell you what needs to be changed to work with modern FASM versions if he sees this.

Hello shack,

Newer conversions for some of them can be found below.

http://nap.koduleht.net/Madis/cache/Iczelion-FASM/

Hello Picnic, and thank you.
This one looks better to me than Sulaiman's translation.
It uses locals directive which simply answers my question(2).
LOCAL in MASM is perhaps "locals" in FASM... maybe.

And some of the scripts in Sulaiman's don't work as I expected
even when compiled without an error.

But all samples encluding the above translation,don't make a section for unintialized data.
Why? there is no assembler directive for making a section for uninitialized data in FASM?
In NASM, .bss is used. This helps reduce the file size because .bss section is not included in the file itself( this is what I learned from a book.).

Not completely sure about the other formats but with PE format (fasm is able of producing them without needing a linker), there is no such a thing as ".bss" or ".data?". What you do instead is to make sure that no uninitialized variables are followed by either initialized data and/or instructions in the same section.

For instance, this will be a 2560 bytes executable:

And this one 1536 bytes:

You could also allocate memory manually.

Thanks,LocoDelAssembly. I understand that.

How? plz?

And what do you think about my question(1)? what I want to know is the reason why they differ in type defintion.

MASM
hInstance HINSTANCE ?
CommandLine LPSTR ?
hwndButton HWND ?
hwndEdit HWND ?


FASM
hInstance dd ?
CommandLine dd ?
hWndButton dd ?
hWndEdit dd ?

I am beggining to think that it's just a persnal preference,but since I am very new to programming, I am not sure. Which is better? Are you FASM users are including custom_windows.inc or just typing "dd"?

HINSTANCE, LPSTR, etc. are the HeLLish way of doing things. Assembly is more "bare metal", so everything becomes a dword.

With VirtualAlloc, free the memory with VirtualFree, or use the Heap functions if you don't want to allocate pages but rather more "high-level" memory: HeapAlloc, HeapFree, etc...

Thank you for the link. I'm also trying to follow Iczelion's tutorials.