This file describe tricks and conventions that are used throughout the code and might need explanation. *** Quickies or a: Equivalent to "cp 0", but results in a shorter opcode. xor a: sets A to 0 more efficiently than ld a, 0 and 0xbf: Given a letter in the a-z range, changes it to its uppercase value if it's already uppercased, then it stays that way. *** Z flag for results Z if almost always used as a success indicator for routines. Set for success, Reset for failure. "xor a" (destroys A) and "cp a" (preserves A) are used to ensure Z is set. To ensure that it is reset, it's a bit more complicated and "unsetZ" routine exists for that, although that in certain circumstances, "inc a \ dec a" or "or a" can work. *** Little endian z80 is little endian in its 16-bit loading operations. For example, "ld hl, (0)" will load the contents of memory address 0 in L and memory address 1 in H. This little-endianess is followed by Collapse OS in most situations. When it's not, it's specified in comments. This get a bit awkward with regards to 32-bit. There are no "native" z80 32-bit operations, so z80 doesn't mandate an alignment. In Collapse OS, 32-bit numbers are stored as "big endian pair of little endian 16-bit numbers". For example, if "ld dehl, (0)" existed and if the first 4 bytes of memory were 0x01, 0x02, 0x03 and 0x04, then DE (being the "high" word) would be 0x0201 and HL would be 0x0403. *** DAA When it comes to dealing with decimals, the DAA instruction, which look a bit obscur, can be very useful. It transforms the result of a previous arithmetic operation involving two BCD (binary coded decimal, one digit in high nibble, the other digit in low nibble. For example, 0x99 represents 99) into a valid BCD. For example, 0x12+0x19=0x2b, but after calling DAA, it will be 0x31. To clear misunderstanding: this does **not** transform an arbitrary value into BCD. For example, "ld a, 0xff \ daa" isn't going to magically give you a binary coded 255 (how could it?). This is designed to be ran after an arithmetic operation. A common trick to transform an arbitrary number to BCD is to loop 8 times over your bitstream, SLA your bits out of your binary value and then run "adc a, a \ daa" over it (with provisions for carries if you expect numbers over 99).