This is FASM tutorial, for beginners and slightly advanced.

You can always find newest version here, or online hosted at Decard's site (http://www.decard.net) in section "articles"

It also includes preprocessor tutorial.

Tutorial is very far to be complete, but I think it is already worth of reading.

Do you have a plan about the contents of following chapters?

First of all, i 'll first finish preprocessor article.

But i think i should go to practical thing, like more instructions, input / output etc. By now user knows almost enough theory to code, he just lacks such info. But I'm not sure.

I think beginners are confused about the difference of coding under
real mode and protected mode.

And when to use "use16" , when to use "use32"?

If you are beginer, better don't use neither use16 nor use32. FASM have right for every format values as default. If you must use some of this directives, you are not beginer, so you should know what to use.

Regards.

i agree with john. It will require protected mode tutorial, which is a very big stuff and i am not experienced with ring 0 coding (i have read zounds articles / tuts / references but never coded in it).

Someone could write such tutorial.

In my tut will I go to 32bit stuff after i finish 286 stuff, so reader will have some chronological picture about processors and so he will understand why have been some changes made, and so he'll remember and understand it better.

thanks for your excellent tutorial,
i found one little mistake in chapter 1
dw 'My first unicode string' is out of range

Hey, Vid, nice job.... much appreciated. Regards, tomtobias

hitertan: thx, you are right. I have to think about how to fix this.

use:


can fix this.

But I don't know why, at first thought the "dw" and "du" are same.

me too, that's why that bug happened. I just deleted it from tutorial, it wasn't very important there. I post fixed version, + something more in preprocessor article (now almost complete)

hi, finished preprocessor tutorial.

now fixed few more minor mistakes in tuts

I was wondering if you would like an HTML version of this tutorial. I would be happy to do it for. I have six years of HTML experience. I would do it for free, of course, because I want to better my knowledge of Assembly. I could also put this tutorial onto my site. But you would retain all the rights to it, i would just like to be credited for making the HTML version.......So think about it and post back...

Vid. I like the tut. When is the next update?

Thanks,
Dr.X
PS: Chapt.3 line 49 edit to [... defines label "name"]

thx, fixed it. This is kind of post i really lack, i found many
obvious erros after posting (and had to fix them myself in
most cases).

I am not in very creative mood right now (still playing NetHack - absolutely don't try it if you haven't before - it's a drug).

I must also rethink how to continue. What do others think? More theory or "practical" info (DOS I/O + arithmetic instructions)??? Reader already knows enough to code basic applications (except those two things), but after starting real coding them he may not fully understand what he wrote.

what about "moving" to 32 bit programming? Although I can't fully agree to the opinion that learning how to program in DOS is just waste of time, I must agree that knowing how to program for win32 is more much important now.
Also, you could finish the chapter about the preprocessor - fix directive and declaring macros inside macros (): they are real power of FASM preprocessor, and oryginal manual doesn't say almost anything about this features. Also, maybe then I could finally undrestand all those fancy solutions in "macrionstructions" forum

Anyway, I really liked your tutorial. I just wonder why I didn't looked at it before , although you wrote that it is for "total beginners", I found it very interesting (espacially preprocessor tut).

regards,
Decard

Vid, Thank you for answering.

I'm not sure what that means. Do you mean you want more info on errors such as that?

I'm sorry to hear that. I was getting very hopeful. But I'm still on chap 3 so maybe since I'm a slow learner, you will get into the mood before I reach anything critical.

I skipped ahead to peak at the other chapters. I was looking for the ability to read a text file for input. Is that something within the scope of the tutorial?

Thanks again.
Dr.X

yes

you should download many tutorials, this one is very incomplete, altough it gives (or should give) you more complex view.

i think nope, at least soon. Reading file is platform-dependant, and so it makes tutorial less general. If i will use some input in my tutorial, then it will be reading keyboard input to learn using ports. But after you learn enough, learning how to read file is just about reading some DOS / Windows documentation.

After your post i started thinking about tutorial again, and i think i have some idea how will it continue - arithmetic instructions, with deep look into arithmetics (signed/unsigned overflow + much more on flags)

hi decard, i just noticed your post before Dr.X's:

In real coding, DOS IS at 95% waste of time. But tutorial is inted to make people understand assembly (and those who want to learn assembly usually want to understand everything). In my tutorial i'll go chronologically 16bit real -> 32 bit protected -> windoze. (or somehow so, i'm not sure for now, it is far future). But leaving scope only on windoze absolutely disallows you to use many assembly aspects (mostly direct hardware programming via ports and interrupt stuff) so it is absolutely unsuitable for tutorial.

Now i'll probably add another chapter to my tutorial, i just started writing it, preprocessor tuts must wait.