Reply 9220 of 18310, by amadeus777999
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wrote:Disassembled the Toshiba 430CDT I picked up a week ago. Removed both the backup and RTC batteries, neither of which had begun leaking... but better safe then sorry. Also wanted to clean the mouse buttons which were dirty and kind of sticky. Had to pretty much disassemble the entire laptop to get at it only to discover that the buttons are actually part of the very same plastic mold as the top part of the laptop's frame (the same frame which the keyboard fits in) and so there's no way to physically detach them. So I had to remove all the metal bits on that end of the frame and try to very carefully run some water over it, take it away, scrub, rinse, and repeat for a bit to get it mostly clean. Not perfect, but clean enough. This was incredibly annoying to do because I wasn't confident that I could detach the LCD hinges without breaking something, so I couldn't just immerse the part of the frame I wanted to clean in water and scrub away because the LCD assembly was still attached to it. Ugh.
wrote:Worked on the C/Assembler Tutorial that I have been planning to do for a long time.
WatcomC + inline + external assembly with TASM.
Nothing too fancy, but should give a nice base for somebody starting his own project. Getting all those little details right is quite a challenge.
Cool, looking forward to reading it when it's done. 😀 I wrote a little something along those lines a while back but it is a bit light on details and only focuses on the "Watcom C + external assembly with TASM" aspect. Mainly wrote it for myself because I kept mucking some little detail up with the calling convention and got tired of flipping through pages in the compiler manual to find whatever detail I was forgetting at the time, heh.
I'll be looking through your ramblings thoroughly - this is looking good... especially the calling conventions and the "Exploring Watcom" article(wish I had such a lofty physical copy).
The essential details are often hard to come by - meaning having the minimum solution at hand that works and is correct. Symbols being all uppercase via TASM/MASM or WatcomC's calling convention can be filed under "deadly details".(devcpp + yasm was easier in this regard). Also getting the convention regarding Watcom's inline assembly right can be bothersome too - fpu related for example.
I also could not use the rdtsc instruction with TASM so I used the "infamous" db 0fh 31h in combination with equ.
Another one where less is more and everybody seems to have a different solution is makefiles... especially Watcom's with their .lnk file "magic".
I tried an example on a site and it just does not work. Do you happen to have a wasm specific makefile with more than one .c file which one could use as a base?
makefiles in general are easy if you do everything explicitely but I would prefer to use the capabilites of the mechanisms behind it... and then the trouble seems to be starting.