Hello from an absolute beginner

[daydreamer]

AV scanners are getting worse, I checked the details of some false positives and they were rejecting some executable file on the basis of Android phone trojans.

I transfer many files between android tablets <-> PC haven't yet found av found any virus
I had to make my visual studio file folders set as exception in av,to not scan because weird behaviour delete  Obj file created by Ms cl.exe when I choose build vc cpp exe,so linker error not found. Obj file
Anyone else got such weird error?
About raymonds BCD tutorial: those x86 special BCD opcodes aren't available in 64 bit mode
I use much masm32 help files from qeditor help menu, mostly finding macros, sometimes when gonna use seldom used opcode
Better use aoa pdf files version on tablets than HTML

[brazer]

You, my friend, have hit the nail squarely on the head. Yes, a split-screen editor would be just the ticket.

And if anyone scoffs, that's exactly what I used to have with MultiEdit, a windowed editor for DOS that was just spectacular. Split windows, vertical or horizontal; select vertical blocks of text as well as horizontal; powerful macro language (oops, macros) that made it fully extensible. Lots more stuff (regular expression search and replace, etc.). I miss it. I still have it on my hard drive, but it no longer runs as of Windows 7. (It still ran under XP.) R.I.P.

Ah, well yet another personal preference, my personal preference is built a lot around MS practices aka. drop old stuff adopt new stuff ASAP.

I have some 20 Windows ISO images in backup, starting from Windows 7 to Windows 11, all versions and service packs ready to use.
However the only benefit I get from these is to say "I have ® Microsoft Windows that no one else has" because you can't simply download it anywhere, especially not the old ones.

Those old OS's are like currency, how much is one willing to pay for ® like Windows 2000 or XP or even older? huh, that's like owning old timer cars!
I very rarely use them for software testing which is a poor reason why I keep them, I prefer to say that I have MS currency on my drive which one day may be expensive,
and I hope my drive doesn't suddenly die out lol

The one major reason for me to use assembler in it's power to do almost anything you could expect a computer could do. If you ever get into such an argument, challenge the other person to write a small program to extract the square root of 123456789.987654321 (or anything similar) with the accuracy of 9,999 decimal digits and display the answer on the screen!

Thanks for the welcome!

That is certainly true, I have collected some 15 sqrt functions in the pas, only one uses inline assembly the rest is C or cpp,
none of these functions outperform standard sqrt or the intrinsic function provided by MS, so I for sure believe you that HLL is horrible for math!

On a separate subject, if you ever delve into writing a program requiring extensive use of floating point maths, significant improvement in the speed of execution can be obtained with assembly. Compared to the use of HLLs, the gains are generally obtained by a possible significant reduction of memory access; with 8 FPU registers, a lot of intermediate results can be retained directly inside the FPU instead of being transfered back and forth between the FPU and memory. While on the above site, you can also have a peek at the "Complex Numbers" section and download the WMANJUL folder. It contains a program generating the Mandelbrot fractal which makes a VERY intensive use of the FPU.

Math is very interesting stuff, I'm able to imagine assembly doing fast math since from what I know all those non asm math libraries under the hood are written in assembly, carefully crafted over the years,
so no wonder nobody defeats intrinsics.

Btw. I hope I don't intrude your privacy by asking this, but you're not by any chance Raymond Chen right?
He's my favorite coder, I've learned a lot of stuff from him.

I had to make my visual studio file folders set as exception in av,to not scan because weird behaviour delete  Obj file created by Ms cl.exe when I choose build vc cpp exe,so linker error not found. Obj file
Anyone else got such weird error?

That's well known, especially if you use WD, I have all VS associated processes added to WD exclusion list, this not only stops intruding my debugging but also intelisense and build times get faster.
Of course sources directory should be added too to WD (or any AV).

Ex. adding assembler + your files to AV exlusions.

[raymond]

Btw. I hope I don't intrude your privacy by asking this, but you're not by any chance Raymond Chen right?
He's my favorite coder, I've learned a lot of stuff from him.

Sorry to disappoint you but I am not the Raymond you were expecting. I'm another Raymond I hope you may be learning something from, probably about the use of the FPU.

[brazer]

Btw. I hope I don't intrude your privacy by asking this, but you're not by any chance Raymond Chen right?
He's my favorite coder, I've learned a lot of stuff from him.

Sorry to disappoint you but I am not the Raymond you were expecting. I'm another Raymond I hope you may be learning something from, probably about the use of the FPU.

I've already taken a look at your side added to my ASM subfolder in bookmarks for future reference
When I get to more advanced chapters I'll know where to look for more info

[NoCforMe]

Ray (Raymond Filiatreault) is our resident FPU guru par excellence. You can look at his stuff in [drive:]\masm32\fpulib.

[brazer]

I Appreciate all the responses and help provided so far, I hope I didn't offend anyone, if I did please accept my apology.

My learning goes slow but you guys were helpful to demystify few myths, also introductory material on the main page of this site was very useful.
Expect more from me in the future when I get to face real issues worth asking help for.

[hutch--]

Just to lead you astray, there is a tool in the MASM32 SDK called SE.EXE, its a scripting engine that runs pre-built scripts that have their own logic and can produce perfectly formatted code if you design the scripts that way. Its no joy to write the scripts but they are fun and fast to use. Knock up working base code in seconds so you can do what you like without having to shovel through hack API code just to get it up and running.

[brazer]

hutch--,

I don't know why but only one "Western Europe" of the 6 links to download SDK works the rest is 404:
https://masm32.com/download.htm

And the link on that site says error 500:
https://www.codingcrew.de/masm32/download.php

[hutch--]

These 4 all work.

US site 2.
Western Europe
Australia 1
Australia 2

Also Bogdan's site in Romania.

There are some updates in the forum for the editor and a few other bits.

[brazer]

It looks like my Brave browser knows better than me what I want to download...

I've tried in MS Edge and it indeed works.

[brazer]

Btw. you said there to be SE.EXE but all that I found is se.dll.

There is a lot to SDK, can I get a shortcut or some hints to use the dll?
I suppose it's used in editor but I don't see any options to generate scripts, only menu items to format indent etc..

EDIT:
I see, it's under the "Script" menu?
That's indeed awesome to be able to insert predefined data and comments.

There are certainly many features which I don't have in VSCode.