DENTHOR/ASPHYXIA'S VGA TRAINERS FLAME EFFECT
This trainer is on assembler. For those people who already know assembler quite well, this tutorial is also on the flame effect.
DENTHOR, coder for ... _____ _____ ____ __ __ ___ ___ ___ ___ __ _____ / _ \ / ___> | _ \ | |_| | \ \/ / \ \/ / | | / _ \ | _ | \___ \ | __/ | _ | \ / > < | | | _ | \_/ \_/ <_____/ |__| |__| |__| |__| /__/\__\ |__| \_/ \_/ smith9@batis.bis.und.ac.za The great South African Demo Team! Contact us for info/code exchange!
Grant Smith, alias Denthor of Asphyxia, wrote up several articles on the creation of demo effects in the 90s. I reproduce them here, as they offer so much insight into the demo scene of the time.
These articles apply some formatting to Denthor's original ASCII files, plus a few typo fixes.
Assembler - the short version
Okay, there are many assembler trainers out there, many of which are probably better than this one. I will focus on the areas of assembler that I find important… if you want more, go buy a book (go for the Michael Abrash ones), or scour the ‘net for others.
First, let us start off with the basic set up of an assembler program.
DOSSEGThis tells your assembler program to order your segments in the same manner that high level languages do.
.MODEL <MODEL><MODEL> can be:
Tiny Code + Data < 64k (Can be made a COM file)
Small Code < 64k Data < 64k
Medium Code > 64k Data < 64k
Compact Code < 64k Data > 64k
Large Code > 64k Data > 64k
Huge Arrays > 64kEnable 286 instructions … can be .386 ; .386P etc.:
.286Set the stack. <size> will be the size of your stack. I usually use 200h:
.STACK <size>Tells the program that the data is about to follow. (Everything after this will be placed in the data segment):
.DATATells the program that the code is about to follow. (Everything after this will be placed in the code segment)
.CODETells the program that this is where the code begins:
START:Tells the program that this is where the code ends:
END STARTTo compile and run an assembler file, we run:
tasm bob
tlink bobI personally use tasm; you will have to find out how your assembler works.
Now, if we ran the above file as follows:
DOSSEG
.MODEL SMALL
.286
.STACK 200h
.DATA
.CODE
START
END STARTYou would think that is would just exit to DOS immediately, right? Wrong. You have to specifically give DOS back control, by doing the following:
START
mov ax,4c00h
int 21h
END STARTNow if you compiled it, it would run and do nothing.
Okay, let us kick off with registers.
Firstly: A bit is a value that is either 1 or 0.
This is obviously quite limited, but if we start counting in them, we can get larger numbers. Counting with ones and zeros is known as binary, and we call it base 2. Counting in normal decimal is known as base 10, and counting in hexadecimal is known as base 16.
Base 2 (Binary) Base 10 (Decimal) Base 16 (Hexadecimal)
0 0 0
1 1 1
10 2 2
11 3 3
100 4 4
101 5 5
110 6 6
111 7 7
1000 8 8
1001 9 9
1010 10 A
1011 11 B
1100 12 C
1101 13 D
1110 14 E
1111 15 FAs you can see, you need four bits to count up to 15, and we call this a nibble. With eight bits, we can count up to 255, and we call this a byte. With sixteen bits, we can count up to 65535, and we call this a word. With thirty-two bits, we can count up to lots, and we call this a double word.
A quick note: Converting from binary to hexadecimal is actually quite easy. You break up the binary into groups of four bits, starting on the right, and convert these groups of four to hex.
1010 0010 1111 0001
= A 2 F 1Converting to decimal is a bit more difficult. What you do, is you multiply each number by its base to the power of its index…
A2F1 hex
= (A*16^3) + (2*16^2) + (F*16^1) + (1*16^0)
= (10*4096) + (2*256) + (15*16) + (1)
= 40960 + 512 + 240 + 1
= 41713 decimalThe same system can be used for binary.
To convert from decimal to another base, you divide the decimal value by the desired base, keeping a note of the remainders, and then read the results backwards.
16 | 41713
16 | 2607 r 1 (41713 / 16 = 2607 r 1)
16 | 162 r F (2607 / 16 = 162 r 15)
16 | 10 r 2 (162 / 16 = 10 r 2)
| 0 r A (10 / 16 = 0 r 10)Read the remainders backwards, our number is A2F1 hex. Again, the same method can be used for binary.
The reason why hex is popular is obvious: using bits, it is impossible to get a reasonable base 10 (decimal) system going, and binary gets unwieldly at high values. Don’t worry too much though: most assemblers (like tasm) will convert all your decimal values to hex for you.
You have four general purpose registers: AX, BX, CX and DX. Think of them as variables that you will always have. On a 286, these registers are 16 bytes long, or one word.
As you know, a word consists of two bytes, and in assembler you can access these bytes individually. They are separated into high bytes and low bytes per word.
High byte | Low byte
0000 0000 | 0000 0000 bits
[--------Word-------]The method of access is easy. The high byte of AX is AH, and the low byte is AL. You can also access BH, BL, CH, CL, DH and DL.
A 386 has extended registers: EAX, EBX, ECX, EDX… you can access the lower word normally (as AX, with bytes AH and AL), but you cannot access the high word directly … you must ror EAX,16 (rotate the binary value through 16 bits), after which the high word and low word swap … do it again to return them. Acessing EAX as a whole is no problem: mov eax, 10; add eax,ebx … these are all valid.
Next come segments. As you have probably heard, computer memory is divided into various 64k segments (note: 64k = 65,536 bytes, sound familiar?) A segment register points to which segment you are looking at. An offset register points to how far into that segment you are looking. One way of looking at it is like looking at a 2D array… the segments are your columns and your offsets are your rows. Segments and offsets are displayed as Segment:Offset … so $a000:50 would mean the fiftieth byte in segment $a000.
The segment registers are ES, DS, SS and CS. A 386 also has FS and GS. These values are words (0-65,535), and you cannot access the high or low bytes separately. CS points to your code segment, and usually if you touch this your program will explode. SS points to your stack segment, again, this baby is dangerous. DS points to your data segment, and can be altered, if you put it back after you use it, and don’t use any global variables while it is altered. ES is your extra segment, and you can do what you want with it.
The offset registers are DI, SI, IP, SP, BP. Offset registers are generally associated with specific segment registers, as follows: ES:DI DS:SI CS:IP SS:SP … On a 286, BX can be used instead of the above offset registers, and on a 386, any register may be used. DS:BX is therefore valid.
If you create a global variable (let’s say bob), when you access that variable, the compiler will actually look for it in the data segment. This means that the statement:
ax = bobcould be
ax = ds:[15]A quick note: A value may be signed or unsigned. An unsigned word has a range from 0 to 65,535. A signed word is called an integer and has a range -32,768 to 32,767. With a signed value, if the leftmost bit is equal to 1, the value is in the negative.
Next, let us have a look at the stack. Let us say that you want to save the value in ax, use ax to do other things, then restore it to its origional value afterwards. This is done by utilizing the stack. Have a look at the following code:
mov ax, 50 ; ax is equal to 50
push ax ; push ax onto the stack
mov ax, 27 ; ax is equal to 27
pop ax ; pop ax off the stackAt this point, ax is equal to 50.
Remember we defined the stack to be 200h further up? This is part of the reason we have it. When you push a value onto the stack, that value is recorded on the stack heap (referenced by SS:SP, SP is incremented) When you pop a value off the stack, the value is placed into the variable you are popping it back in to, SP is decremented and so forth. Note that the computer does not care what you pop the value back into.
mov ax, 50
push ax
pop bxThis would set the values of both ax and bx to 50. (There are faster ways of doing this, pushing and popping are fairly fast though).
push ax
push bx
pop ax
pop bxThis would swap the values of ax and bx. As you can see, to pop the values back in to the original variables, you must pop them back in the opposite direction to which you pushed them.
push ax
push bx
push cx
pop cx
pop bx
pop axwould result in no change for any of the registers.
When a procedure is called, all the parameters for that procedure are pushed onto the stack. These can actually be read right off the stack, if you want to.
As you have already seen, the mov command moves a value…
mov <dest>, <source>Note that dest and source must be the same number of bits long.
mov ax, dlwould not work, and neither would
mov cl,bxHowever:
mov cx,dx
mov ax,50
mov es,axare all valid.
shl I have explained before, it is where all the bits in a register are shifted one to the left and a zero added on to the right. This is the equivalent of multiplying the value by two. shr works in the opposite direction.
rol does the same, except that the bit that is removed from the left is replaced on the right hand side. ror works in the opposite direction.
div <value> divides the value in ax by value and returns the result in al if value is a byte, placing the remainder in ah. If value is a word, the double word DX:AX is divided by value, the result being placed in ax and the remainder in dx. Note that this only works for unsigned values.
idiv <value> does the same as above, but for signed variables.
mul <value> If value is a byte, al is multiplied by value and the result is stored in ax. If value is a word, ax is multiplied by value and the result is stored in the double word DX:AX.
imul <value> does the same as above, but for signed variables.
The j* commands are fairly simple: if a condition is met, jump to a certain label.
jz <label> Jump if zero
ja <label> Jump above (unsigned)
jg <label> Jump greater (signed)and so forth.
An example:
cmp ax,50 ; Compare ax to 50
je @Equal ; If they are equal, jump to label @equal
call MyProc ; Runs procedure MyProc and then returns to the next line of code.Procedures are declared as follows:
MyProc proc near
ret ; Must be here to return from where it was called
MyProc endpVariables are also easy:
bob db 50creates a variable bob, a byte, with an initial value of 50.
bob2 dw 50creates a variable bob2, a word, with an initial value of 50.
bob3 db 1,2,3,4,5,65,23creates bob3, an array of 7 bytes.
bob4 db 100 dup (?)creates bob4, an array of 100 bytes, with no starting value.
Go back and look at Part 7 for a whole lot more assembler commands, and get some sort of reference guide to help you out with others. I personally use the Norton Guides help file to program assembler.
Fire Routines
To demonstrate how to write an assembler program, we will write a fire routine in 100% assembler. The theory is simple.
Set the palette to go from white to yellow to red to blue to black. Create a 2D array representing the screen on the computer. Place high values at the bottom of the array (screen) for each element, do the following:
- Take the average of the four elements under it:
* Current element
123
4 Other elements- Get the average of the four elements, and place the result in the current element.
- Repeat
Easy, no? I first saw a fire routine in the Iguana demo, and I just had to do one ;) … it looks very effective.
With the sample file, I have created a batch file, make.bat. It basically says:
tasm fire
tlink fireSo to build and run the fire program, type:
make
fireThe source file is commented quite well, so there shouldn’t be any problems.
In closing
As you can see, the sample program is in 100% assembler. For the next tutorial I will return to Pascal, and hopefully your newfound assembler skills will help you there too.