Overview of Emu8086

Emu8086 Overview

Everything for learning assembly language in one pack! Emu8086 combines an advanced source editor, assembler, disassembler, software emulator (Virtual PC) with debugger, and step by step tutorials.

This program is extremely helpful for those who just begin to study assembly language. It compiles the source code and executes it on emulator step by step.

Visual interface is very easy to work with. You can watch registers, flags and memory while your program executes.

Arithmetic & Logical Unit (ALU) shows the internal work of the central processor unit (CPU).

Emulator runs programs on a Virtual PC, this completely blocks your program from accessing real hardware, such as hard-drives and memory, since your assembly code runs on a virtual machine, this makes debugging much easier.

8086 machine code is fully compatible with all next generations of Intel's micro-processors, including Pentium II and Pentium 4, I'm sure Pentium 5 will support 8086 as well. This makes 8086 code very portable, since it runs both on ancient and on the modern computer systems. Another advantage of 8086 instruction set is that it is much smaller, and thus easier to learn.

Before we start...

Make sure you have the latest Emu8086 pack (assembler and emulator), you can download it from here: http://www.coval.net/teach/emu8086.

You can also use any other assembler, but this could be more difficult since you may need to work from the command prompt and Emu8086 is a Windows based application so you can enjoy user-friendly Windows environment.

Emu8086 has a much easier syntax than any other assemblers, but still generates the same machine code, so it's good for beginners.

Emu8086 has a much easier syntax than any of the major assemblers, but will still generate a program that can be executed on any computer that runs 8086 machine code; a great combination for beginners!

Note: If you don't use Emu8086 to compile the code, you won't be able to step through your actual source code while running it.

Where to start?

Start Emu8086 by selecting its icon from the start menu, or by running Emu8086.exe.
Select "Samples" from "File" menu.
Click [Compile and Emulate] button (or press F5 hot key).
Click [Single Step] button (or press F8 hot key), and watch how the code is being executed.
Try opening other samples, all samples are heavily commented, so it's a great learning tool.
This is the right time to see the tutorials