Lesson H1- Hello World on the TI-84 Lets take a look at a minimal example on the TI-84

BasicHello.asm

We need to ensure the assembler knows we are in eZ80 mode by setting ADL=1 To start our program, we need our code to start at $D1A881 , but we need a 2 byte header with the bytes $EF $7B The IY register is used by the firmware, so we change it at our peril!... we back it up onto the stack at the start of our program. We then clear the screen $020810 (_ClrScrnFull) and reset the cursor pos using firmware function $020828 (_homeup)

When we finish our program, we just use a RET command to return to the OS

We'll use two firmware routines to do our character work, "PutC" ($00207B8) will print the character in the accumulator to the screen, "_newline" ( $00207F0) will move down a line. We define these as symbols, so we can use them easilly.
Because we now have the ability to print a character, we can extend this into a function to print whole strings. Our code prints a string that is ended with a 255, we just pass the string address in HL
This can be used to show a test string to the screen

As a bonus, we can include the Monitor functions we wrote in the multiplatform series, These allow us to show the Z80 registers, or parts of the system memory for debugging purposes
This adds 2 new functions... Monitor shows all the registers... Monitor_MemDumpDirect shows part of the memory... it shows BC bytes from address HL
Due to the small screen*, the Monitor isn't very useful, but it's always there if you need it!

The Limited screen space means these monitor tools aren't a lot of use They were designed for the 'bitmap font' example in the platform series, which used a smaller font.

In these tutorials we use SPASM to compile, we need to specify various parameters. First, We need to specify a Source file, Next we specify a Destination - this is a binary, but we'll need to convert it to an 8xp later We need to enable eZ80 mode Finally we specify a Listing file - this is for debugging and contains output which may help us if we have trouble. We're also specifying to ignore case sensitivity, and check for labels that look like commands
if we're using Cemu.exe, we can get the emulator to automatically transfer the new command In this example we're specifying the complete 8xp to execute We specify the rom file to use, We're also specifying a config file on the command line.
To start a program we need to press the prgm button
Select the program we just assembled
If we don't want to use the command line, we can also transfer our program via drag and drop.