Printing to the screen without a db
NASM gives you the ability to create useful macros that have a calling convention similar to BASIC statements. Macros can be used for many purposes, and here one is used to emulate BASIC's PRINT statement.
Note: this macro is designed to be used in real mode only, since it uses BIOS functions.
print_string: ; Null terminated string in SI. pusha ; Push all registers mov ah, 0Eh ; INT 10h teletype. .loop: lodsb ; Get byte from string. cmp al, 0 ; Null terminator reached? je .done ; Yes, end printing. int 10h ; No, print the character. jmp .loop ; Loop! .done: popa ; Pop all registers. ret ; Return. %macro print 1+ section .data ; At the end of the binary. %%string: db %1,0 section .text ; Back to where we were. mov si,%%string call print_string ; Print it out using the print_string function. %endmacro
Now you can use print as if it were a function or instruction in your OS like so (note, you don't want to use this in a bootloader, it messes with the data section and I don't know how to place the boot signature at the end of the data section and still pad out to 512 bytes):
print 'Printing without a db in NASM!',0Dh,0Ah ; Print out a little message!
By the way, a little feature of NASM is the usage of the ` (back quote) character to contain a string that can use C-style escape codes like \n. It's nice and helpful.