Addressing Modes Summary
The iAPX88 processor supports seven modes of memory access. Remember that immediate is not an addressing mode but an operand type. Operands can be immediate, register, or memory. If the operand is memory one of the seven addressing modes will be used to access it. The memory access mechanisms can also be written in the general form “base + index + offset” and we can define the possible addressing modes by saying that any one, two, or none can be skipped from the general form to form a legal memory access. There are a few common mistakes done in forming a valid memory access. Part of a register cannot be used to access memory. Like BX is allowed to hold an address but BL or BH are not. Address is 16bit and must be contained in a 16bit register. BX-SI is not possible. The only thing that we can do is addition of a base register with an index register. Any other operation is disallowed. BS+BP and SI+DI are both disallowed as we cannot have two base or two index registers in one memory access. One has to be a base register and the other has to be an index register and that is the reason of naming them differently. Direct A fixed offset is given in brackets and the memory at that offset is accessed. For example “mov [1234], ax” stores the contents of the AX registers in two bytes starting at address 1234 in the current data segment. The instruction “mov [1234], al” stores the contents of the AL register in the byte at offset 1234. Based Register Indirect A base register is used in brackets and the actual address accessed depends on the value contained in that register. For example “mov [bx], ax” moves the two byte contents of the AX register to the address contained in the BX register in the current data segment. The instruction “mov [bp], al” moves the one byte content of the AL register to the address contained in the BP register in the current stack segment.
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