ASM Community

Your probably better off to store it as a number then convert it when you have to display it...

Number dd 5
szAttack db 16 DUP(0) ; make it big enough to hold the largest possible number DWORD aligned

add Number, Whatever
invoke dwtoa,Number,,OFFSET szAttack

If you are using MASM, then dwtoa is a function in the masm32.lib that converts a dword to a string

wsprintf is *very* slow, if you're just doing integers use the dwtoa function, it is much faster. If you are sure to have only number 0 through 9, just add 30H to the number and pass the address to the number,it is fastest of all. Another way is to use the following for 0 through 99 it is very fast:

LOCAL szAttack :DWORD



mov eax,Number

aam

add eax,3030H

bswap eax

shr eax,16

mov szAttack,eax



invoke MessageBox,NULL,ADDR szAttack,NULL,MB_OK

Well, if you're doing a game, here are the tic counts for the methods mentioned here:

Based on maximum value for each function
using Pentium 3 for tests

add 30h method = 1 tic
aam method = 20 tics
dwtoa method = 39 tics
wsprintf method = 237 tics (using %d formatting)
wsprintf method = 1028 tics (using %u formatting)

Backgrounds for what? do you mean for your window ? Solid or bitmap ? If you're looking for a background colour for your window you can either set it in the class structure of the window or use something like this in your WindowProc :

; LOCALs that are needed :

LOCAL ps		:PAINTSTRUCT

LOCAL hDC		:DWORD

LOCAL hRgn		:DWORD

LOCAL hBrush		:DWORD

LOCAL OldObject		:DWORD





.ELSEIF uMsg == WM_PAINT

	invoke BeginPaint,hWin,ADDR ps

		mov hDC,eax

		; Create a brush to be used for painting (this should be done elsewhere)

		invoke CreateSolidBrush,0042DE21h

		; Save the brush handle to destroy it later

		mov hBrush,eax

		; Select the brush handle into the DC for painting

		invoke SelectObject,hDC,hBrush

		; save the object that was previously in the DC

		mov OldObject,eax

		; Create a region from the parameters passed in the paintstruct

		invoke CreateRectRgn, ps.rcPaint.left, ps.rcPaint.top, ps.rcPaint.right, ps.rcPaint.bottom

		; The region handle must be saved to destroy it later

		mov hRgn,eax

		invoke PaintRgn, hDC, hRgn

		; restore the old object into the DC

		invoke SelectObject,hDC,OldObject

		; Clean up the GDI

		invoke DeleteObject,hRgn

		invoke DeleteObject,hBrush

	invoke EndPaint,hWin,ADDR ps

	mov eax,TRUE

	ret

The quesions are OK. For bitmap I think that there is a tutorial for that, Iczelion # 25 if I remember correctly.

You can download the full set in chm format from this site :

http://www.masmforum.com/website/

Go to tutorials,it's at the bottom. It will give you the option of searching through the tutorials for your subject.

Well, I would suggest that you use a dialog as main window type application (Tutorial #10). Download RadASM from the following site :

http://radasm.visualassembler.com/

It has a very good dialog editor that will allow you to place the buttons with a visual editor.Be sure to download the help file as well, it will show you how to use the IDE.

You can do anything with a dialog box that you can do with a window. In effect it is simply a window where Windows handles most of the creation and message handling. There are a few minor differences, mostly advantages like using the TAB key to navigate and simple control and background colouring using the WM_CTLCOLORxxx messages. I rarely ever use windows, prefering the ability to quickly edit a dialog in RadASM. If you use the dialog as window, you have all of the features of a window but with the advantage that you can buildit visually. The disadvantage is that it requires a slightly larger resource section and might add 1 or 2 Kb to your program. Using RadASM you can also add bitmaps and icons to your resource section so that they don'thave to be external to your application.

The available controls are on the dialog editor toolbox, you would use the Edit Control for that, you can set it to numeric only in the properties window if you want to allow only numbers. You can also use an up/down control set up as a spinbox that will allow the user to use arrows to do it.