logoalt Hacker News

ataylor284_yesterday at 10:11 PM0 repliesview on HN

If anybody's interested in the V20 from a programming perspective, The User's Manual from NEC is here: https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_necV20V30U_11351331/mo....

The V20 instruction set is interesting and has some very 1980s extensions. In addition to the 8080 emulation mode, it has instructions for binary-coded decimal arithmetic and bit fields.

However, NEC uses their own naming scheme which makes picking out the differences from the 8088 unnecessarily difficult. The bits are the same but the mnemonics are different. For example, they renamed all the registers (AX -> AW, SI -> IX, etc) and many opcodes (JMP -> BR, REP MOVSB -> REP MOVBK).