Logic and Bit Manipulation Operations - Tutorial - Programming the 65816 Including the 6502, 65C02, and 65802 (1986)

Programming the 65816 Including the 6502, 65C02, and 65802 (1986)

Part III. Tutorial

10. Logic and Bit Manipulation Operations

The logical operations found in this chapter are the very essence of computer processing; even the arithmetic functions, at the lowest level, are implemented as combinations of logic gates. Logic, or more accurately, boolean logic, is concerned with the determination of "true" and "false."

Computers can represent simple logical propositions and relationships as binary states: the bit-value used to represent "1" in a given computer is considered equivalent to true; the bit-value which stands for "0" is considered equivalent to false. This designation is in fact arbitrary, and the values could easily be reversed. What matters is the consistent application of the convention. Alternative terms are "set" and "reset" (or "clear”), "on" and "off," "high" and "low," "asserted” and "negated." There is a tendency to equate all of these terms; this is generally acceptable except when you are concerned with the actual hardware implementation of these values, in which case the issue of positive logic ("on" means "true") vs. negative logic ("off" means "true") becomes a consideration. But the intuitive assumption of a positive logic system ("1" equals "on" equals "true") seems the most natural, and may be considered conventional, so the terms listed above as equivalent will be used interchangeably, as appropriate for a given context.

Before discussing these functions, it is important to remember the bit-numbering scheme described in Chapter 1: bits are numbered right to left from least significant to most significant, starting with zero. So a single byte contains bits zero through seven, and a double byte contains bits zero through fifteen. Bit zero always stands for the "one's place." Bit seven stands for the "128ths place" and bit fifteen stands for the "32768ths place," except that the high bit of a signed number is, instead, the sign bit. A single bit (or string of bits smaller than a byte or double byte) is sometimes called a bit-field, implying that the bits are just a part of a larger data element like a byte or double byte.

You'll find two types of instructions discussed in this chapter; the basic logic functions, and the shifts and rotates. They're listed in Table 10.1.

Table 10.1. Logic Instructions.

Logic Functions

The fundamental logical operations implemented on the 65x processor are and, inclusive or, and exclusive or. These are implemented as the AND, ORA, and EOR machine instructions. These three logical operators have two operands, one in the accumulator and the second in memory. All of the addressing modes available for the LDA, STA, ADC, SBC, and CMP instructions are also available to the logical operations. The truth tables for these operations are found in Chapter 1 and are repeated again in the descriptions of the individual instructions in Chapter 18.

In addition to these instructions, there are also bit testing instructions that perform logical operations; these are the BIT (test memory bits), TSB (test and set bits), and TRB (test and reset bits) instructions. These three instructions set status flags or memory values based on the result of logical operations, rather than affecting the accumulator.

The logical and bit manipulation instructions are broadly useful: for testing for a condition using boolean logic (for example, if this is true and that is true then do this); for masking bit fields in a word, forcing them to be on or off; for performing quick, simple multiplication and division functions, such as multiplying by two or taking the modulus of a power of two (finding the remainder of a division by a power of two); for controlling I/O devices; and for a number of other functions.

The most typical usage of the boolean or logical operators is probably where one of the two operands is an immediate value. Immediate values will generally be used in these examples. Additionally, operands will usually be represented in binary form (prefixed by a percent sign—%), since it makes the bit-pattern more obvious. All of the logical operations are performed bitwise; that is, the result is determined by applying the logical operation to each of the respective bits of the operands.

Logical AND

Consider, for example, the eight-bit AND operation illustrated in Figure 10.1.

Figure 10.1. The AND Operation.

The result, $42 or %0100 0010, is formed by ANDing bit zero of the first operand with bit zero of the second to form bit zero of the result; bit one with bit one; and so on. In each bit, a one results only if there is a one in the corresponding bit-fields of both the first operand and the second operand; otherwise zero results.

An example of the use of the AND instruction would be to mask bits out of a double-byte word to isolate a character (single-byte) value. A mask is a string of bits, typically a constant, used as an operand to a logic instruction to single out of the second operand a given bit or bit-field by forcing the other bits to zeroes or ones. Masking characters out of double bytes is common in 65802 and 65816 applications where a "default" mode of sixteen-bit accumulator and sixteen-bit index registers has been selected by the programmer, but character data needs to be accessed as well. For some types of character manipulation, it is quicker to simply mask out the extraneous data in the high-order byte than to switch into eight-bit mode. The code in Listing 10.1 is fragmentary in the sense that it is assumed that the core routine is inserted in the middle of other code, with the sixteen-bit accumulator size already selected.

It may seem to be splitting hairs, but this routine, which compares the value in a string of characters pointed to by the value in the memory variable CHARDEX to the letter 'e' is two machine cycles faster than the alternative approach, which would be to switch the processor into the eight-bit accumulator mode, compare the character, and then switch back into the sixteen-bit mode.

Listing 10.1.

Each time the program is executed with a different value for CHARDEX, a different adjacent character will also be loaded into the high byte of the accumulator. Suppose the value in CHARDEX were four; when the LDA STRING,Y instruction is executed, the value in the low byte of the accumulator is $65, the ASCII value for a lower-case 'e'.The value in the high byte is $20, the ASCII value for the space character (the space between "These" and "characters"). Even though the low bytes match, a comparison to 'e' would fail, because the high byte of the CMPinstruction's immediate operand is zero, not $20 (the assembler having automatically generated a zero as the high byte for the single-character operand 'e').

However, by ANDing the value in the accumulator with %0000000011111 111 ($00FF), no matter what the original value in the accumulator, the high byte of the accumulator is zeroed (since none of the corresponding bits in the immediate operand are set). Therefore the comparison in this case will succeed, as it will for CHARDEX values of 2, 13, 18, 28, 32, 38, and 46, even though their adjacent characters, automatically loaded into the high byte of the accumulator, are different.

The AND instruction is also useful in performing certain multiplication and division functions. For example, it may be used to calculate the modulus of a power of two. (The modulus operation returns the remainder of an integer division; for example, 13 mod 5 equals 3, which is the remainder of 13 divided by 5.) This is done simply by ANDing with ones all of the bits to the right of the power of two you wish the modulus of and masking out the rest. A program fragment illustrating this will be provided later in this chapter, where an example of the use of the LSR instruction to perform division by powers of two will also be given.

In general, the AND operation is found in two types of applications: selectively turning bits off (by ANDing with zero), and determining if two logical values are both true.

Logical OR

The ORA instruction is used to selectively turn bits on by ORing them with ones, and to determine if either (or both) of two logical values is true. A character-manipulation example (Listing 10.2) is used—this time writing a string of characters, the high bit of each of which must be set, to the Apple // screen memory—to demonstrate a typical use of the ORA instruction.

Since the video screen is memory-mapped, outputting a string is basically a string move. Since normal Apple video characters must be stored in memory with their high-order bit turned on, however, the ORA #% 10000000 instruction is required to do this if the character string, as in the example, was originally stored in normal ASCII, with the high-order bit turned off. Note that it clearly does no harm to OR a character with $80 (% 10000000) even if its high bit is already set, so the output routine does not check characters to see if they need to have set the high bit, but rather routinely ORs them all with $80 before writing them to the screen. When each character is first loaded into the eight-bit accumulator from STRING, its high bit is off (zero); the ORA instruction converts each of the values—$48, $65, $6C, $6C, $6F—into the corresponding high-bit-set ASCII values—$C8, $E5, $EC, SEC, and $EF, before storing them to screen memory, where they will be displayed as normal, non-inverse characters on the video screen. In this case, the same effect (the setting of the high-order bit) could have been achieved if $80 had been added to each of the characters instead; however, the OR operation differs from addition in that even if the high bit of the character already had a value of one, the result would still be one, rather than zero plus a carry as would be the case if addition were used. (Further a CLC operation would also have been required prior to the addition, making ORA a more efficient choice as well.)

Listing 10.2.

Logical Exclusive-OR

The third logical operation, Exclusive-OR, is used to invert bits. Just as inclusive-OR (ORA) will yield a true result if either or both of the operands are true, exclusive-or yields true only if one operand is true and the other is false; if both are true or both are false, the result is false. This means that by setting a bit in the memory operand of an EOR instruction, you can invert the corresponding bit of the accumulator operand (where the result is stored). In the preceding example, where the character constants were stored with their high bits off, an EOR #$80instruction would have had the same effect as ORA #$80; but like addition, if some of the characters to be converted already had their high-order bits set, the EOR operation would clear them.

Two good examples of the application of the EOR operation apply to signed arithmetic. Consider the multiplication of two signed numbers. As you know, the sign of the product is determined by the signs of the multiplier and multiplicand according to the following rule: if both operands have the same sign, either positive or negative, the result is always positive; if the two operands have different signs, the result is always negative. You perform signed multiplication by determining the sign of the result, and then multiplying the absolute values of both operands using the same technique as for unsigned arithmetic. Finally, you consider the sign of the result: if it is positive, your unsigned result is the final result; if it is negative, you form the final result by taking the two's complement of the unsigned result. Because the actual multiplication code is not included, this example is given as two fragments, 10.1 and 10.2.

Fragment 10.1 begins by clearing the memory location SIGN, which will be used to store the sign of the result. Then the two values to be multiplied are exclusive-OR'd, and the sign of the result is tested with the BPL instruction. If the sign bit of the result is negative, you know that the sign bits of the two operands were different, and therefore the result will be negative; a negative result is preserved by decrementing the variable SIGN, making its value $FFFF.

Next, the two operands are converted to their absolute values by two's complementing them if they are negative. The technique for forming the two's complement of a number is to invert it, and then add one. The EOR operation is used again to perform the inversion; the instruction EOR #$FFFF will invert all of the bits in the accumulator: ones become zeroes, and zeroes become ones. An INC A instruction adds one. In the case of NUM2, this result must be saved to memory before the accumulator is reloaded with NUM1, which is also two's complemented if negative.

Fragment 10.1.

At this point, the unsigned multiplication of the accumulator and NUM2 can be performed. The code for the multiplication itself is omitted from these fragments; however, an example of unsigned multiplication is found in Chapter 14. The important fact for the moment is that the multiplication code is assumed to return the unsigned product in the accumulator.

Fragment 10.2.

What remains is to adjust the sign of the result; this code is found in Fragment 10.2. By testing the sign of SIGN, it can be determined whether or not the result is negative; if it is negative, the actual result is the two's complement of the unsigned product, which is formed as described above.

Bit Manipulation

You have now been introduced to the three principal logical operators, AND, ORA, and EOR. In addition, there are three more specialized bit-manipulating instructions that use the same logical operations.

The first of these is the BIT instruction. The BIT instruction really performs two distinct operations. First, it directly transfers the highest and next to highest bits of the memory operand (that is, seven and six if m = 1, or fifteen and fourteen if m = 0) to the n and v flags. It does this without modifying the value in the accumulator, making it useful for testing the sign of a value in memory without loading it into one of the registers. An exception to this is the case where the immediate addressing mode is used with the BIT instruction: since it serves no purpose to test the bits of a constant value, the n and v flags are left unchanged in this one case.

BIT's second operation is to logically AND the value of the memory operand with the value in the accumulator, conditioning the z flag in the status register to reflect whether or not the result of the ANDing was zero or not, but without storing the result in the accumulator (as is the case with the AND instruction) or saving the result in any other way. This provides the ability to test if a given bit (or one or more bits in a bit-field) is set by first loading the accumulator with a mask of the desired bit patterns, and then performing the BIT operation. The result will be non-zero only if at least one of the bits set in the accumulator is likewise set in the memory operand. Actually, you can write your programs to use either operand as the mask to test the other, except when immediate addressing is used, in which case the immediate operand is the mask, and the value in the accumulator is tested.

A problem that remained from the previous chapter was sign extension, which is necessary when mixed-precision arithmetic is performed—that is, when the operands are of different sizes. It might also be used when converting to a higher precision due to overflow. The most typical example of this is the addition (or subtraction) of a signed eight-bit and a signed sixteen-bit value. In order for the lesser-precision number to be converted to a signed number of the same precision as the larger number, it must be sign-extended first, by setting or clearing all of the high-order bits of the expanded-precision number to the same value as the sign bit of the original, lesser-precision number.

In other words, $7F would become $007F when sign-extended to sixteen bits, while $8F would become $FF8F. A sign-extended number evaluates to the same number as its lesser precision form. For example, $FF and $FFFF both evaluate to -1.

You can use the BIT instruction to determine if the high-order bit of the low-order byte of the accumulator is set, even while in the sixteen-bit accumulator mode. This is used to sign extend an eight-bit value in the accumulator to a sixteen-bit one in Listing 10.3.

Listing 10.3.

The pair of "test-and-set" instructions, TSB and TRB, are similar to the BIT instruction in that they set the zero flag to represent the result of ANDing the two operands. They are dissimilar in that they do not affect the n and v flags. Importantly, they also set (in the case ofTSB) or reset (in the case of TRB) the bits of the memory operand according to the bits that are set in the accumulator (the accumulator value is a mask). You should recognize that the mechanics of this involve the logical functions described above: the TSB instruction ORs the accumulator with the memory operand, and stores the result to memory; the TRB inverts the value in the accumulator, and then ANDs it with the memory operand. Unlike the BIT instruction, both of the test-and-set operations are read-modify-write instructions; that is, in addition to performing an operation on the memory value specified in the operand field of the instruction, they also store a result to the same location.

The test-and-set instructions are highly specialized instructions intended primarily for control of memory-mapped I/O devices. This is evidenced by the availability of only two addressing modes, direct and absolute, for these instructions; this is sufficient when dealing with memory-mapped I/O, since I/O devices are always found at fixed memory locations.

Shifts and Rotates

The second class of bit-manipulating instructions to be presented in this chapter are the shift and rotate instructions: ASL, LSR, ROL and ROR. These instructions copy each bit value of a given word into the adjacent bit to the "left” or "right." A shift to the left means that the bits are shifted into the next-higher-order bit; a shift to the right means that each is shifted into the next-lower-order bit. The bit shifted out of the end—that is, the original high-order bit for a left shift, or the original low-order bit for a right shift—is copied into the carry flag.

Shift and rotate instructions differ in the value chosen for the origin bit of the shift or rotate. The shift instructions write a zero into the origin bit of the shift—the low-order bit for a shift left or the high-order bit for a shift right. The rotates, on the other hand, copy the original value of the carry flag into the origin bit of the shift. Figure 10.2a. and Figure 10.2b. illustrate the operation of the shift and rotate instructions.

The carry flag, as Fragment 10.3 illustrates, is used by the combination of a shift followed by one or more rotate instructions to allow multiple-precision shifts, much as it is used by ADC and SBC instructions to enable multiple-precision arithmetic operations.

In this code fragment, the high-order bit in LOCI is shifted into the carry flag in the first ASL instruction and a zero is shifted into the low-order bit of LOCI; its binary value changes from

The next instruction, ROL, shifts the value in the carry flag (the old high bit of LOCI) into the low bit of LOC2. The high bit of LOC2 is shifted into the carry.

Figure 10.2a. Shift and Rotate Left.

Fragment 10.3.

Figure 10.2b. Shift and Rotate Right.

A double-precision shift left has been performed.

What is the application of the shift and rotate instructions? There are two distinct categories: multiplication and division by powers of two, and generalized bit-manipulation.

Left shifts multiply the original value by two. Right shifts divide the original value by two. This principal is inherent in the concept of positional notation; when you multiply a value by ten by adding a zero to the end of it, you are in effect shifting it left one position; likewise when you divide by ten by taking away the right-most digit, you are shifting right. The only difference is the number base of the digits, which in this case is base two.

Shifting is also useful, for the same reason, in a generalized multiply routine, where a combination of shift and add operations are performed iteratively to accomplish the multiplication. Sometimes, however, it is useful to have a dedicated multiplication routine, as when a quick multiplication by a constant value is needed. If the constant value is a power of two—such as four, the constant multiplier in Fragment 10.4—the solution is simple: shift left a number of times equal to the constant's power of two (four is two to the two power, so two left shifts are equivalent to multiplying by four).

Fragment 10.4.

The result in the accumulator is $2334 times four, or $8CD0. Other "quickie” multiply routines can be easily devised for multiplication by constants that are not a power of two. Fragment 10.5 illustrates multiplication by ten: the problem is reduced to a multiplication by eight plus a multiplication by two.

Fragment 10.5.

After the first shift left, which multiplies the original value by two, the intermediate result (1234 * 2 = 2468) is stored at location TEMP. Two more shifts are applied to the value in the accumulator, which equals 9872 at the end of the third shift. This is added to the intermediate result of 1234 times 2, which was earlier stored at location TEMP, to give the result 12,340, or 1234 * 10.

Division using the shift right instructions is similar. Since bits are lost during a shift right operation, just as there is often a remainder when an integer division is performed, it would be useful if there were an easy way to calculate the remainder (or modulus) of a division by a power of two. This is where the use of the AND instruction alluded to earlier comes into play.

Fragment 10.6.

Consider Fragment 10.6. In this case, $E21F is to be divided by four. As with multiplication, so with division: two shifts are applied, one for each power of two, this time to the right. By the end of the second shift, the value in the accumulator is $3887, which is the correct answer. However, two bits have been shifted off to the right. The original value in the accumulator is recovered from the stack and then ANDed with the divisor minus one, or three. This masks out all but the bits that are shifted out during division by four, the bits which correspond to the remainder or modulus; in other words, the original value can be reconstructed by multiplying the quotient times four, and then adding the remainder.

The second use for the shift instructions is for general bit manipulation. Since the bit shifted out of the word always ends up in the carry flag, this is an easy way to quickly test the value of the high- or low-order bit of a word. Listing 10.4 gives a particularly useful example: a short routine to display the value of each of the flags in the status register. This routine will, one by one, print the letter-name of each of the status register flags if the flag is set (as tested by the BCS instruction), or else print a dash if it is clear.

Listing 10.4.

Listing 10.4.