INMC 80 News

Then when the Z80 encountered this, the PC would be pointing to 1000H. The Z80 would get the first byte and increment the PC. The Z80 then interprets the first byte fetched (the op-code), note that the PC is already pointing at l001H. Having decided that the instruction is a two byte instruction, it would fetch the second byte (the operand), and increment the PC to 1002 by so doing. At this stage the Z80 has all the information it requires, and procedes to add the second byte (the operand of the jump relative instruction) to the low byte of the CURRENT contents of the PC. Now the PC had already been incremented by the action of fetching the op-code and the operand, and is now pointing to 1002H, so 1002H + 05H makes the address in the PC 1007H, ie: +5 relative to the CURRENT PC position, and not +5 relative to the start of the instruction as is commonly assumed. It works exactly the same backwards, except that the operand supplied is a negative number. The Z80 still adds this to the CURRENT contents of the PC, and so the PC ends up pointing back, but two bytes short of where you might expect.

Now, out of pure cowardice, part 1 didn’t contain any information about ‘signed binary arithmetic’ (that’s positive and negative numbers to you). I don’t intend to rectify that omission now, but refer you to any ‘0 level” maths text book. (Go on, own up to the kids that you don’t know it all, and borrow one of theirs; either that, or say you want to find out just how ignorant kids are these days, and to check that the text books contain information on binary arithmetic in this computer age.) Which ever way you go about it, you will find that signed binary arithmetic is a bit of a pain, and the designer of NAS-SYS and Nasbug T4, Richard Beal (God bless his little cotton socks) has included the ‘A’ command to ease this problem. Now I’m not going to waste paper explaining it here, go and read the NAS-SYS or Nasbug manual and in the light of what I said above, all should become clear. The only thing I will add is that because the operand of a relative jump instruction is restricted to a single byte, the maximum range can only be FFH (256 decimal). Now because of the offset of two bytes, this means that the effective range of a relative jump is 80H (equivalent to 127 decimal steps backwards) to 7FH (equivalent to 129 decimal steps forward). So don’t get too clever and try jumping all round the memory in relative jumps, ”cos it just won’t work.

Well, all that means is that lines 90 and 140 can become relative jumps, thus saving two bytes of code.

80               JR START       ; Go back to beginning
140              JR NZ,LOOP     ; If not both 0 then loop again.

Another thing we can have a go at is the delay routine. Now I wrote that because at the time I couldn’t think of anything better. (As I admitted in part 3, what I actually wrote was worse, and I’m ashamed to show you exactly what I did.) How many of you realised that NAS-SYS and Nasbug both contain a very nice delay routine as part of the keyboard scanning routine, whats more, its location was deliberately chosen so that users could have ready access to it. Its label is RDEL, and it starts at location 0038H. Now the nice thing about that location is that it is one of the Z80 ‘restart’ points. To be compatible with the 8080, the Z80 included the eight restart points from the 8080. Now these are ‘implied CALL” locations and are a fixed part of the Z80 structure. One specific single byte instruction will cause the Z80 to call that location. So here we have a delay routine (its actual delay time varies from 7.5mS to 2.5mS depending upon it being NAS-SYS or Nasbug, or wether the Nascom is running at 2 of 4MHz), accessible by a single byte call. All we have to do is to call that a number of times, and there is our delay.

So now to learn about another very useful Z80 instruction, the ‘DJNZ loop’. The ‘DJNZ’ instruction is translated as “Decrement, Jump (relative) if Not Zero’, and what it does is decrement the B register, test it, and if it’s not zero, do a relative jump to the location specified by the operand. If B was zero, then it simply “drops through’ to the next instruction. To use the DJNZ loop we must decide how long the delay is going to be, and because the delay varies between versions of the monitor and the Nascom speed, we’ll choose 5mS as a good compromise. Two hundred times 5mS is one