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Starting Msx Assembly 4

Published at October 22, 2020 ·  9 min read

So lets start where we ended in part 3. We had a piece of code which printed a letter, one by one, to the screen to finally print “Hello world”.

Execute:
        LD HL, HELLO

LOOP:   LD A, (HL)
        CP 0
        RET Z
        CALL CHPUT
        INC HL
        JP LOOP	
HELLO:  db "Hello world",0

First we point register pair HL to the label HELLO. On that label we define a set of bytes (db) in memory, “Hello world”. Effectively, HL now contains the memory adress of the capital H. INC HL will increase HL so it will point to the next byte in memory, containing the letter e. Now what will happen if we use INC (HL) instead?

Moved Server

Published at July 18, 2020 ·  2 min read

When you are reading this, this website is no longer served from my own personal server. I’ve been running my own servers for years, but I didn’t feel like keeping the server up to date, configure it for email etc.

So I moved my domain, bosselaar.net, to Google. My email is now hosted by Google G Suite and this website is now running on Google Firebase. Time to remove my VPS.

Moving was quite straightforward, although the email migration took quite a bit longer then I expected. My mailbox size is about 5GB but it took a couple of days before the migration tool copied all my email over to G Suite. And my own private server was not the bottleneck ;) After the mail was migrated it was just a matter of pointing the MX records to the Google ones and new mail arrived in Gmail.

Time Flies

Published at July 8, 2020 ·  1 min read

What a year it has been…

The last 12 months have flown by and no update on this site, so time to change chat.

It’s been a bit over a year now since I lost my brother and a bit over 2 since I lost my father. Most of the time things are going fine and I’m usually a cheerful guy but sometimes the emotions still hit me and it can cost a lot of energy. And the corona thing is also not really helping ;) . Anyway, expect some updates (soonish).

Starting MSX Assembly part 3

Published at June 1, 2019 ·  8 min read

So we’ve seen how we can call the BIOS and how to use an assembler to create a file which can be BLOAD’ed and run on an (emulated) MSX. So now that is out of the way, lets do the mother of all tutorials: Hello world!

This can be pretty hard to start with if you want to do this in screen 2 of the MSX. But let’s do this in screen 0 because then we can get some help from the BIOS. The BIOS has a nice call that can display a character on the screen called CHPUT. There are a lot of resources which list all the BIOS calls, e.g. http://map.grauw.nl/resources/msxbios.php , so of you want to get an overview of all the BIOS calls, start reading those ;)

Fietselfstedentocht

Published at June 1, 2019 ·  2 min read

So next week is the “fietselfstedentocht”, roughly translated at “11 city cycling tour”. Originally an ice (speed) skating event of about 200km long. By bike this is about 235km which have to be completed in a day. For me, 235km is a thing. I hope I survive ;) The most I have done on my racingbike is 115km by myself. That took about 4.5 hours including some rest.

Why would I ride such a distance in a day you might ask? For 2 reasons actually. The first is that I was asked to join this event as parts of Simon’s peleton/platoon. A group of people trying to raise money for Support Casper. The group is named after my father who passed away about a year ago due to pancreas cancer. Casper van Eijk is doing new research because this type of cancer usually means you won’t survive. A cycling buddy of my father started this group, asked me to join, and eventually asked me to join the fietselfstedentocht.