Day 2

A (Some) Little Stuff About ARM Assembly

	ARM is the company who makes the GBA's CPU (processor). To get technical the GBA's 
processor is a ARM7TDMI. ARM processors (unlike Intel processors that are CISC) are RISC.
RISC stands for Reduced Instruction Set Computers (CISC is Complex . . .). Although there 
are not many instructions (a good thing), ARM (maybe most RISC I donno) instructions have
many different uses and combinations which makes RISC processors as powerful as they are.

	
     Registers

	I don't know about other ARM processors, but the one in the GBA has 16 registers
and unlike Intel (and other) processors, all registers can be (most of the time) freely
messed with. The registers are:

r0,r1,r2,r3,r4,r5,r6,r7,r8,r9,r10,r11,r12,r13,r14,r15

Wow! that's alot! An explanation is in order:

r0 : Yours to mess with!

r1 : ditto

r2 to r12 : ditto

r13 : On some ARM systems, r13 is the Stack Pointer, (SP for ya Intel folks). As I'm not
too sure about r13's role in the GBA, I'll just say this, try not to mess with it while 
you do stack stuff.

r14 : Contains the return address for subroutine calls, if you don't make any, then this
is yours to mess with freely as well.

r15 : Program Counter & Flags, like the IP (Instruction Pointer in Intel), it's unlike the 
Intel IP register in that you have free access to it like any other register, but be warned 
messing with it WILL make your code jump to another place in memory and mess up the flag 
settings.

Let's do the math, hmm... 16 total minus 3 (at most), gives us 13 registers. Yep, ain't that
cool? 13 registers. Calm down (are you hyperventalating at the thought, I know I am :-)).

	Now, you still may be wondering exactly what registers are. Registers are special
places in memory that are actually internal to the processor and have no actual memory 
address, they are just known by thier names. The registers are 32bits wide, so they can
hold 32bit numbers. Almost everything in any assembly language uses registers, so get to
know them like you know your mama (And while you're at it, give 'er a hug too :-))




	
     ARM Assembly Instructions


	First, I am going to start off by saying that I think that whoever though up the
ARM assembly language is a genius. 

	Second, I'd like to introduce my good friend CMP. Say hi to CMP and maybe, just
maybe, he'll be your new best friend. CMP stands for CoMPare, CMP can compare a register
and a number, register and a register, or register and memory. Now, after comparing, CMP
sets what is called the status flags, which tell you the result of the comparation (is 
that a word?). As you may recall, the register r15 contains the flags. The flags tell the
result of an instruction, the CMP instruction just is specialy made to set the flags and 
do nothing else. The sort of things that the flags represent is shown below:

The states they can store are:

EQ EQual
NE Not Equal
VS oVerflow Set
VC oVerflow Clear
HI HIgher
LS Lower or the Same
PL PLus
MI MInus
CS Carry Set
CC Carry Clear
GE Greater than or Equal
GT Greater Than
LE Less than or Equal
LT Less Than
Z is Zero
NZ is not Zero

These states become very important throughout ARM asm.

NOTE: Flags are just where the conditions (EQual, Less 
Than, etc) are stored. Other than that, they aren't too important.


	
     The Conditional Suffixes


	You have already seen the B (Branch) instruction. The B instruction
just takes a label and goes right to it with what's called an Unconditional Jump (like GoTo
in BASIC or JMP in Intel asm). Unlike Intel (and CISC processors) the B instruction
just takes a suffix of the state of the flags to check for and if the flags don't 
represent the desired state, the Branch doesn't happen and the code continues as if
nothing happened. The suffixes of the flag states (and what they mean) are listed above.
So if you wanted to check to see if register r0 was equal to register r4 and then branch
to a label called label34, the code would be like this:

CMP r0, r4     ; Comments in assembly are marked by semi-colons (;)
BEQ label34    ; B is branch and EQ is translated as "If EQual to"

NOTE : With the Goldroad Assembler, labels need no colon(:), and must be by themselves on a
line.
NOTE II : The capitalization of CMP and BEQ is not necessary and is just so you can see better.

	Now, you know that you can Branch on the state of the flags, but what you don't know is 
that you can do anything depending on the state of the flags, just put the suffix on 
whatever instruction you want!

	Also, you don't have to use CMP to set the state of the flags, if you want an 
instruction like SUB (Subtract) to set the flags, add the suffix 'S' to the instruction
(stands for Set flags). This is usefull if you don't want to Set the flags with an extra
CMP instruction, so to set the flags and Branch if the result is zero would be like this:

SUBS r0,r1,0x0FF   ; Sets the state of the flags to the resulting state of the instruction. 
ldrZ r0,=0x0FFFF   ; Will only Load Register r0 with 0x0FFFF if the state of the flags 
indicates a Zero result.



	
     Review


	Today, we learned (more) about the registers. We also learned about the flexability
of ARM instructions to execute depending on the state of the flags. We learn't alot today.

Today, we learn't about ARM assembly. Tomorrow, we use it to put a picture on the GBA screen.

- Something is only impossible until it's possible.
- Jean-Luc Picard, Capt. , USS Enterprise 


Intro - Day 3