Question

I am trying to get my program to display a string on two different lines.

This is a .com program and I am using A86 assembler.

jmp start               ; This will start the program

;============================

  msg   db  "Hello Word.$"      ; A string variable 
  msg   db  "Michael J. Crawley$"   ; A string variable with a value.

;============================

start:

  mov ah,09             ; subfunction 9 output a string

  mov dx,offset msg         ; DX for the string

  int 21h               ; Output the message

  int 21h               ; Output the message

exit:

  mov ah,4ch
  mov al,00             ; Exit code 

  int 21h               ; End program

Answer 1

Here are your specific problems:

• You define msg twice (a86 will barf on that).
• You call int21 fn9 with the same value of msg so you’re not printing the two messages out, just two copies of the first.
• You don’t have a newline character in either message so they’ll abut each other rather than be on separate lines.

The solutions to those points (without providing the actual code).

• Label the second message as msg2.
• Load msg2 into dx before calling int21 for the second time.
• Change the messages to put a newline before the ‘$’ symbol (or at least the first one).

---

Update: Since some other helpful soul has already provided source, here’s my solution. I would suggest you learn from this and modify your own code to do a similar thing. If you copy it verbatim from a public site for classwork, you’ll almost certainly be caught out for plagiarism:

         jmp start                   ; This will start the program

msg      db  "Hello Word.",0a,"$"    ; A string variable .
msg2     db  "Michael J. Crawley$"   ; A string variable with a value.

start:   mov ah,09                   ; subfunction 9 output a string
         mov dx,offset msg           ; DX for the string
         int 21h                     ; Output the message
         mov dx,offset msg2          ; DX for the string
         int 21h                     ; Output the message
exit:
         mov ah,4ch
         mov al,00                   ; Exit code 
         int 21h                     ; End program

This outputs:

Hello Word.
Michael J. Crawley