alt Hacker NewsBut with only four segment registers, you couldn't treat it as that - not unless you only had four objects. So treating it as a sliding window was all you actually could do with it.
Replies
AshamedCaptain • today at 5:12 PM
That's almost like saying that with 2 registers you can only do additions with 2 operands. True, but missing the picture. The number of segments is not limited by the number of segment registers, or even (gasp!) by the number of segment descriptors.
With 6-7 general purpose registers you could have; since anyway only three of them were usable for addressing you constantly had to load from memory. just use MOV ES instead of MOV BX to load a pointer and you actually got to increase your GPRs by one or two. Nobody did it except for larger memory areas which were allocated using farmalloc() or the INT 21h allocator.