Question

I’m a newbie to asm and trying to make a simple hello world which awaits for the user to press a key to end. For now the hello world is all good, but the .exe console program i got from this just close instantly while i want it to stay on screen untill the user press a key.
Now the problem i have is that for some reason, the program keep looping, searching for user input, but when i force close the program (^C) i can see all the keys i pressed are written on the next console line, like if it was using the wrong buffer (?)

I’ve been searching a fix all over the internet for a few days and finally I’m asking for help cuz this is driving me crazy ^^
Everything i found is mostly based on int system or under linux, while i have to deal with the windows api…

Thank you very much, any help or hint is welcome!

Code :

STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE   equ -11
STD_INPUT_HANDLE    equ -10 
NULL                equ 0

global start
extern ExitProcess, GetStdHandle, WriteConsoleA, ReadConsoleInputA

section .data
msg                 db "Hello World!", 13, 10, 0
msg.len             equ $ - msg
consoleInHandle     dd 1

section .bss
buffer              resd 2
buffer2             resd 2

section .text
    start:

        push    STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE
        call    GetStdHandle

        push    NULL
        push    buffer
        push    msg.len
        push    msg
        push    eax
        call    WriteConsoleA 

    read:

        push STD_INPUT_HANDLE
        call GetStdHandle
        mov [consoleInHandle],eax
        push consoleInHandle
        push dword[buffer2]
        push 1
        push NULL
        call ReadConsoleInputA

        cmp eax,1
        jge exit
        jmp read

    exit:

        push    NULL
        call    ExitProcess

Moar info about windows functions can be found here:

• ReadConsoleInput
• WriteConsole

Answer 1

push consoleInHandle pushes the address, not the handle. You want push dword [consoleInHandle]. Conversely, for the buffer you want to pass the address, so you need push buffer2 there. Also, this buffer should be the size of an INPUT_RECORD structure, which I believe is 32 bytes.

Update: As Frank commented, the argument order was also wrong.
This code works for me (note I had to add the @xx stdcall decorations due to how my environment is set up – apparently you don’t need those):

STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE   equ -11
STD_INPUT_HANDLE    equ -10
NULL                equ 0

global start
extern ExitProcess@4, GetStdHandle@4, WriteConsoleA@20, ReadConsoleInputA@16

section .data
msg                 db "Hello World!", 13, 10, 0
msg.len             equ $ - msg
consoleInHandle     dd 1

section .bss
buffer              resd 2
buffer2             resb 32

section .text
    start:

        push    STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE
        call    GetStdHandle@4

        push    NULL
        push    buffer
        push    msg.len
        push    msg
        push    eax
        call    WriteConsoleA@20

    read:

        push STD_INPUT_HANDLE
        call GetStdHandle@4
        mov [consoleInHandle],eax
        push NULL
        push 1
        push buffer2
        push dword [consoleInHandle]
        call ReadConsoleInputA@16

    exit:

        push    NULL
        call    ExitProcess@4