ti86 Assembly Tutorial

"Everything should be made as simple as possible." - Albert Einstein

This tutorial aims to teach the reader how to program assembly for the ti86 graphic calculator from Texas Instruments. It will start with the theory behind assembly and will go on to cover instructions, ROM calls, assembler directives and some of the advanced graphics functions.

No previous knowledge of assembly is required or assumed, however it is essential that the reader has some familiarity with a high-level language of some sort. The tutorial will include example programs in the calculator's built in language, usually to explain what an example assembly program will do. The built-in language is easy to learn, especially since I won't use any of the advanced functions, and if you have any knowledge of Basic, c or Pascal then you should be able to understand the sample programs with no problems.

Main Tutorial

Reference Information

Instruction Reference

Availability

This tutorial can be viewed online, or alternatively you can download the tutorial in the following formats:

Available tutorial formats
File Type	File	Description	Size
zip File	asm86.zip	All files, graphics and source for example programs.	143 Kb
exe File	asm86.exe	The above zip file in a 32 bit Self-Extracting exe file.	173 Kb

The Tutorial

This tutorial has been designed to work on every web browser available. It doesn't use any browser-specific tags or features and even if you have an older browser which doesn't support HTML 4.0 you should still be able to see everything (just without the pretty colours...) in the tutorial.

I have used CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) on these pages, but if your browser doesn't support them you won't lose any of the content. At the time of writing no browser actually supports all the features that I've included in my style sheets, but because of the way CSS works if your browser doesn't recognise any of the instructions given it just skips them and applies any formatting it can. You can tell if your browser supports CSS quite easily - if the introduction has a light blue background then your browser supports them.

This tutorial has been tested under Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 (Win95, Win2000), Netscape Communicator 4.7 (Win95, Win2000, version 4.5 on Linux and various versions on various Macs and iMacs), Opera 3.60 (Win 95), Lynx (Win3.1 and Win95) and Amaya Release 2.1 (Win95). It has also been partially tested on AvantGo's browser for the Palms. It was written in raw HTML using a variety of text editors, mainly Notepad and HTML-Kit. It conforms to the w3c HTML 4.0 and CSS2 standards. The author supports the AnyBrowser campaign., a campaign for a non-browser specific World Wide Web. You will probably see three images at the bottom of each page - two from w3c to say that I write real html, and one with a link to the AnyBrowser pages. Apart from these I've tried to keep graphics to a minimum to enable anyone with a slow modem to see these pages quickly.

Note: there's a bug in Netscape 4.x which may cause some pages to print incorrectly. From what I can see the width of the page is set to some huge number and so word wrap may not function. I've sort of fixed this, but the right hand side of the page may be clipped slightly. Sorry.

Comments, Questions, Suggestions, Hate Mail etc.

If you have any comments, questions, suggestions, hate mail, offers of money etc then feel free to email me, I'll try to answer as quickly as possible.

Copyright

All material in this tutorial is © Copyright 1999 Ciaran McCreesh. You may distribute this tutorial so long as this copyright notice remains with it at all times. You may not modify the contents of this tutorial in any way. You may quote sections from this tutorial providing a link to the original tutorial is provided.

I am in no way liable for any damage this tutorial causes you, your computer or your calculator. Jump up and down on your calculator at your own risk. I have tried to make all information in this tutorial correct, however I make no guarantee that it is.