Rough Guide to Assembly

Programs written in assembly language run faster, and are usually smaller than the ones written in High-level languages. Even for the compiler gurus at Microsoft and Borland, assembly is still faster than C++ or C. Also, using assembly, you have better access to computer hardware than while using high-level languages.

Assembly language has its own disadvantages. Simple procedures often require several lines of coding in Assembly. Often, such programs are also dependent on the type of machine they are running on. Sometimes it is more sensible to write programs in C++, specially when you want to save time. If you go through this website, you'd learn how to program simple applications in x86 assembly (for the computers running Intel microprocessors).

Lets Start!

To begin with, you need an assembler (a program that converts assembly language program to machine level code).

One of the free assemblers is Debug.exe which comes with Windows or DOS. Click here to learn some basic Debug commands.
Primarily I have been using Microsoft Assembler (MASM). However the Net Wide Assembler (NASM) is considered a better substitute. Click here to view the NASM manual. You can get NASM from http://www.octium.net/nasm/, or from ftp://ftp.us.kernel.org/pub/software/devel/nasm/

If you want MASM, you can visit:

http://www.microsoft.com/ddk/download/98/BINS_DDK.EXE. A file called BINS_DDK.EXE will be downloaded to your computer. Run it, and then you'd find two files called BIN_WIN98_ML.EXE and BIN_WIN98_ML.ERR on your computer. Rename them as ML.EXE and ML.ERR respectively.

These two files comprise of the Microsoft Assembler.

You also need another file called LINK.EXE. You can get it from the following link:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/vc15/Update/1/WIN98/EN-US/Lnk563.exe

Click to download a file called Lnk563.exe. When you execute it, it'll extract the file LINK.EXE

Gather ML.EXE, ML.ERR, and LINK.EXE to a separate folder, and you are done

If you wish to take a look the the MASM Manual, click again!. Its incomplete cause I don't get time to do the HTML formatting.