7526 DCT Reference


Function Prototypes

All 7526 ROM microcode Application Program Interfaces (APIs) use a PC-DOS style interface. That is, parameters are placed in processor registers and the appropriate software interrupt is invoked. Thus, it is possible to use the APIs from any language that can both write to and read from the processor registers, either directly or indirectly. To facilitate use of the APIs from high level languages, an API library is supplied which supports the C language calling convention. The library modules are coded in assembly language. Each module takes passed parameters from the stack and places them in the appropriate processor registers, invokes the software interrupt and writes any returned values from the processor registers into variables indicated by passed pointers.

Because the current language compilers support mixed memory models, the 7526 API library uses a large model interface. For applications written in C/2, it is essential to include the subsystem header file, CFRAPI26.H for the APIs used in the program. The CFRAPI26.H file contains function prototypes for each API in the subsystem. These prototypes will cause the compiler to generate the correct calling sequence regardless of the memory model used by the application. The header file also contains definitions of manifest constants and structures used with the APIs. The defined constants should be used exclusively to avoid conflicts with possible future changes to an API.