64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer's Manuals

The Art of Picking Intel Registers I wrote this article for an online magazine called Scene Zine. Scene Zine caters to the Demo Scene, which is an digital art community dedicated to pushing the limits of computers through a mix of music, art, and computer programming. A particular category of demoscene productions, 4K intros, focus on the final production's raw file size. The goal is to put as much high-quality music, graphics, and animation as possible into only 4096 bytes. Doing this requires highly-specialized size optimization techniques, since 4096 bytes is less space than two pages of typed text or a true-color Windows XP icon. This article discusses some of these techniques. Some people have commented that they want to see more expert programming articles in Scene Zine. When the engineers at Intel designed the original 8086 processor, they had a special purpose in mind for each register. Using the registers consistently has other advantages besides size optimization. Each register name is really an acronym.