I apologize if this question seems really basic. I am new to "thinking in assembly" if you will. As I'm sure you all know, there is a little bit of a learning curve from going from high level language algorithms to asm thinking...

That said, what I'm doing is writing small programs in asm that help me better understand asm itself. I'm writing a small program that should print the FLAGS register. This is what I currently have:


I've excluded most of the program to be concise but you can see what I'm doing here.

This code successfully prints the FLAGS register to the console, but it does it in HEX... I want to print it in BINARY such that I can see every single bit. Eventually, I want to label each bit so I can see which flags are set. But I do not know how one would go about printing binary straight to the console... I know in C that you have to do a workaround using a switch-case because there's not a "binary format specifier." Is there a simple way to do this in asm? Thank you.

The question has nothing to do with C vs asm differences. You’re using a C function printf, so what would you expect? Either the function has such capability or you have to implement the feature yourself. Just like in any other programming language. Seems like this time you’re unlucky and have to write it yourself.

By "print ... straight to the console" do you mean using the OS services? Or do you mean programming the hardware yourself? Or do you mean using the CRT library functions?

Each of these three would require different code to accomplish.

Do you already know how to convert a value into a string of 0's and 1's? I'm sure we can help if this is something you are not sure about.

There is an interesting discussion about this here.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40811218/creating-an-x86-assembler-program-that-converts-an-integer-to-a-16-bit-binary-st

yeohhs thanks for the link, that's helpful.

revolution, that was a good question. I think I'm going to stick to msvcrt funcs for now. I think programming the hardware myself would be cool too but I have no knowledge of how to go about that other than by using 8086emu and interrupts. I don't think I can do that on a current Windows machine anymore right?

So if you use the MSVCRT DLL functions then one way to do what you want is to convert the value to a string of 0s/1s, and then you can use printf to output the string with %s.

There's only 16 total hex nibbles anyways. So just use a small lookup table. Honestly, hex is very easy to convert to binary (1:1), so you can do it in your head fairly easily. Decimal 8 is bit 3 is 1000, decimal 15 (0xF) of all four bits (8+4+2+1) is 1111, decimal 10 (0xA, 8+2) is 1010.