LLX > Neil Parker > Apple II > Multiplying and Dividing on the 6502

Multiplying and Dividing on the 6502

Introduction

One of the more common questions asked by new 6502 programmers seems to be, "Hey...there's no multiply instruction! How do I multiply on the 6502?" This article presents some answers to this question, and as a bonus, answers to the companion question, "How do I divide on the 6502?"

Of course the methods shown below are not the only ways to multiply and divide, nor even the fastest. They are, however, probably the easiest ways to understand.

Most of the routines below are for unsigned integers, since these are the easiest kinds of numbers to work with. Extending them to signed integers is discussed briefly near the end. (The next logical step, numbers with fractional parts, would require a whole new article.)

The Easiest Way to Multiply

The easiest way to multiply on the 6502 is not to do it at all.

Actually, that statement isn't nearly as useless as it seems. Sometimes the nature of the problem is such that with a little rewriting, the multiplication can be eliminated entirely. This happens often in loops, if the loop index has to be multiplied by something. As an example, consider the following BASIC-like code fragment:

FOR I = 5 TO 100 STEP 5
  J = I*23
  Do something with J
NEXT I

This can be rewritten like this:

J = 115: REM 115 = 5*23
FOR I = 5 TO 100 STEP 5
  Do something with J
  J = J+115
NEXT I

This kind of rewriting is called strength reduction. Optimizing compilers will usually notice when this is possible, and automatically rewrite the code to take advantage of it.

The problem with this, of course, is that many multiplications can't be eliminated by rewriting. For these cases, the rule is, "Don't work any harder than you have to." If all you need is to multiply by a constant, the code for that will usually be much more efficient than a general routine to multiply any two arbitrary numbers.

Multiplying by a Constant

Skipping over the trivial cases of multiplying by zero or one, the easiest constant to multiply by is two, because all you need are the ASL and ROL instructions. For a single-byte result:

        ASL NUM

Or for a two-byte result:

        ASL NUM
        ROL NUM+1

Extending this to wider numbers should be obvious.

Multiplying by 4, 8, 16, or higher powers of two is simply a matter of multiplying by two enough times to get the result. For example, to multiply a one-bye number by four:

        ASL NUM
        ASL NUM

Or for two-byte numbers:

        ASL NUM
        ROL NUM+1
        ASL NUM
        ROL NUM+1

Multiplying by a constant other than a power of two is more difficult, but it can be done by adding up the results of several power-of-two multiplications. This will generally require the use of temporary memory locations to hold intermediate results.

For example, consider multiplication by 3. To do this, we note that for any number x, 3x = 2x + x - that is, we can multiply by three by multiplying by two, and adding the original number to the result. Of course this means the original number has to be kept around somewhere so it will be available for the addition. For two-byte numbers:

        LDA NUM       ;Start with RESULT = 2*NUM
        ASL A
        STA RESULT
        LDA NUM+1
        ROL A
        STA RESULT+1
        CLC
        LDA NUM
        ADC RESULT
        STA RESULT
        LDA NUM+1
        ADC RESULT+1
        STA RESULT+1  ;RESULT = 3*NUM

Or we can multiply by 10 using the fact that 10x = 8x + 2x (or, factoring out a 2, 10x = 2(4x + x)):

        LDA NUM       ;Start with RESULT = NUM
        STA RESULT
        LDA NUM+1
        STA RESULT+1
        ASL RESULT
        ROL RESULT+1  ;RESULT = 2*NUM
        ASL RESULT
        ROL RESULT+1  ;RESULT = 4*NUM
        CLC
        LDA NUM
        ADC RESULT
        STA RESULT
        LDA NUM+1
        ADC RESULT+1
        STA RESULT+1  ;RESULT = 5*NUM
        ASL RESULT
        ROL RESULT+1  ;RESULT = 10*NUM

So how do we figure out what powers of two we need to add to get the answer? Easy: Just write the binary equivalent of the constant, and look for the 1 bits. The position of each 1 bit shows which powers of two need to be added to get the answer. For example,

3 (decimal) = 11 (binary)
              |+--  1
              +--- +2
                   --
                    3, i.e. 1x + 2x = 3x

10 (decimal) = 1010 (binary)
               | +--  2
               +---- +8
                     --
                     10, i.e. 2x + 8x = 10x

25 (decimal) = 11001 (binary)
               ||  +--   1
               |+-----   8
               +------ +16
                       ---
                        25, i.e. x + 8x + 16x = 25x.

But what if you need to multiply two numbers, and you don't know what either one is in advance? In this case, you need a general multiply-anything-by-anything routine.

Multplying Arbitrary Numbers

A reasonable way to multiply arbitrary numbers is to do it the way you learned in school, with pencil and paper. Consider an example:

   654
 x 321
 -----
   654
 1308
1962
------
209934

If the steps are written out as an algorithm, it goes something like this:

The secret of binary multiplication is that it works exactly like decimal multiplication, as long as you use the addition and multiplication tables for binary digits:

 +| 0  1      x| 0 1
--+-----     --+----
 0| 0  1      0| 0 0
 1| 1 10      1| 0 1

The algorithm in the binary case is slightly simpler than the decimal algorithm:

Here's an example:

  110
x 101
-----
  110
110
-----
11110

This is quite easy to turn into machine language - the only tricky thing in the code below is that instead of shifting the added number to the left, it shifts the answer one place to the right each time, catching the lost bit in a memory location. Here it is for one-byte numbers:

        LDA #0       ;Initialize RESULT to 0
        LDX #8       ;There are 8 bits in NUM2
L1      LSR NUM2     ;Get low bit of NUM2
        BCC L2       ;0 or 1?
        CLC          ;If 1, add NUM1
        ADC NUM1
L2      ROR A        ;"Stairstep" shift (catching carry from add)
        ROR RESULT
        DEX
        BNE L1
        STA RESULT+1

Note that though we were multiplying one-byte numbers, the result requires two bytes. The general rule for multiplication is that the number of bytes in the result will be equal to the number of bytes in the first number, plus the number of bytes in the second number.

The method is easily extendable to wider numbers. Here's a routine for multiplying two-byte numbers, giving a four-byte result:

        LDA #0       ;Initialize RESULT to 0
        STA RESULT+2
        LDX #16      ;There are 16 bits in NUM2
L1      LSR NUM2+1   ;Get low bit of NUM2
        ROR NUM2
        BCC L2       ;0 or 1?
        TAY          ;If 1, add NUM1 (hi byte of RESULT is in A)
        CLC
        LDA NUM1
        ADC RESULT+2
        STA RESULT+2
        TYA
        ADC NUM1+1
L2      ROR A        ;"Stairstep" shift
        ROR RESULT+2
        ROR RESULT+1
        ROR RESULT
        DEX
        BNE L1
        STA RESULT+3

At this point it seems to be common for people to ask for additional routines to multiply even wider numbers. Rather than bloat this article with even more routines for numbers of various sizes, I encourage readers to look back over the algorithm just described and the examples that implement it - once these are understood, writing additional routines is straightforward.

Division

Passing over the trivial case of dividing by 1, the easiest number to divide by is 2:

        LSR NUM

Or, for two-byte numbers:

        LSR NUMHI
        ROR NUMLO

This replaces the original number with the result, and leaves the remainder in the carry flag.

As with multiplication, dividing by higher powers of two is simply a matter of repeating the above. The remainder can be found by saving the bits shifted off into the carry flag - the first bit shifted out is the lowest bit of the remainder, the second bit shifted is the next-to-lowest bit of the remainder, and so on.

Unfortunately, dividing by constants that are not powers of two is harder than multiplying by them - hard enough that it's often easiest just to go for the general divide-anything-by-anything routine, especially if you need the remainder.

Dividing Arbitrary Numbers

As with multiplication, a reasonable division algorithm can be found by looking at the way you would write out a long division with pencil and paper. Consider the following example, written in the manner traditionally taught in U.S. schools:

       184
   _______
67 ) 12345
     -67
     ---
      564
     -536
     ----
       285
      -268
      ----
        17

Here we divided a dividend, 12345, by a divisor, 67, and got quotient of 184, with a remainder of 17. Note the procedure...at each step, we find the largest multiple of the divisor that is less than the leftmost remaining digits of the dividend, and subtract. Then we bring down the next digit of the dividend, and repeat until no more digits are left.

Binary division works exactly the same way, as long as you use the rules for binary digits instead of decimal digits. For example:

        10101
    _________
101 ) 1101101
     -101
     ----
        11
        -0
        --
        111
       -101
       ----
         100
          -0
         ---
         1001
         -101
         ----
          100

Note how much easier this is than the decimal version, mostly because there are only two possible numbers to subtract: 0 or the divisor.

Again, writing code to do this isn't very hard. We will shift the bits of the the dividend, one at a time, into a work area, and then try subtracting the divisor from the work area. If the subtraction succeeded, we replace the work area with the result of the subtraction and record a 1 bit in the quotient. If the subtraction failed, we discard its result and record a 0 bit in the quotient. The process is repeated until all bits of the dividend are used up.

Here's an example that divides the two-byte number NUM1 by the two-byte number NUM2, leaving the quotient in NUM1 and the remainder in REM:

        LDA #0      ;Initialize REM to 0
        STA REM
        STA REM+1
        LDX #16     ;There are 16 bits in NUM1
L1      ASL NUM1    ;Shift hi bit of NUM1 into REM
        ROL NUM1+1  ;(vacating the lo bit, which will be used for the quotient)
        ROL REM
        ROL REM+1
        LDA REM
        SEC         ;Trial subtraction
        SBC NUM2
        TAY
        LDA REM+1
        SBC NUM2+1
        BCC L2      ;Did subtraction succeed?
        STA REM+1   ;If yes, save it
        STY REM
        INC NUM1    ;and record a 1 in the quotient
L2      DEX
        BNE L1

Beware! Since multiplying two one-byte numbers gives you a two-byte result, the knee-jerk expectation is that dividing a two-byte number by a one-byte number should give you a one-byte quotient. This turns out not to be true! When dividing two numbers, the quotient must be as wide as the dividend (consider dividing by 1, in which case the quotient is the dividend), and the remainder must be as wide as the divisor (because it can be as large as divisor-1).

Again, I'm not going to bloat this article by showing division routines for different sizes of numbers. Once the method is understood, writing additional routines is straightforward.

I feel the NEED for SPEED!

The routines shown above are reasonably compact, but not the speediest. With a little bit of trickery, we can squeeze a few cycles out of some of the above routines...for example, here's the one-byte multiplication again, using the carry flag instead of the Y register for the loop counter, which takes the DEY instruction out of the loop:

        LDA #$80     ;Preload sentinel bit into RESULT
        STA RESULT
        ASL A        ;Initialize RESULT hi byte to 0
L1      LSR NUM2     ;Get low bit of NUM2
        BCC L2       ;0 or 1?
        CLC          ;If 1, add NUM1
        ADC NUM1
L2      ROR A        ;"Stairstep" shift (catching carry from add)
        ROR RESULT
        BCC L1       ;When sentinel falls off into carry, we're done
        STA RESULT+1

Assuming RESULT is in page 0, this saves 14 cycles. As an added bonus, the Y register is no longer trashed.

A little more trickery can get the CLC out of the loop, saving 2 cycles per 1-bit in NUM2:

        LDA #$80     ;Preload sentinel bit into RESULT
        STA RESULT
        ASL A        ;Initialize RESULT hi byte to 0
	DEC NUM1
L1      LSR NUM2     ;Get low bit of NUM2
        BCC L2       ;0 or 1?
        ADC NUM1     ;If 1, add (NUM1-1)+1
L2      ROR A        ;"Stairstep" shift (catching carry from add)
        ROR RESULT
        BCC L1       ;When sentinel falls off into carry, we're done
        STA RESULT+1

Since the initial DEC NUM1 costs 5 cycles (if NUM1 is in page 0), this is a win if NUM2 has at least three 1-bits.

But even the fastest of those routines, under the best possible circumstances (all variables in page 0, no page crossings, and NUM2 = 0), takes 151 cycles. If you need to do much better than that, different techniques must be used. The best way to get fast multiplication or division on the 6502 is table lookup - i.e., the programmer precomputes the answers to the multiplication or division problems and stores them in a table, and when the program needs to multiply or divide, it looks up the answer in the table.

Of course this means there's a tradeoff between speed and code size. Table lookup works best when the numbers to be multiplied or divided fall in a limited range, otherwise the tables quickly grow to unmanageable sizes - for example, a multiplication table for multiplying two arbitrary one-byte numbers requires more memory than the 6502 can directly access.

Fortunately, with a little bit of algebra, the multiplcation table can be made much smaller, at the cost of a little extra execution time. Consider these two ways of writing the binomial equation:

(a + b)^2 = a^2 + 2*a*b + b^2,
(a - b)^2 = a^2 - 2*a*b + b^2.

If the bottom equation is subtracted from the top, we get

(a + b)^2 - (a - b)^2 = 4*a*b,

Or, rearranging,

a*b = ((a + b)^2 - (a - b)^2)/4
    = (a + b)^2/4 - (a - b)^2/4.

Thus we can do a multiplication with an addition, two subtractions, a couple of right shifts, and a couple of lookups in a table of squares. And if we're clever about the coding, we can make most of that work trivial - Here are the tricks to make it work:

A brief setup routine is needed to set up four pointers in page 0:

        LDA #SSQLO/256
        STA PSLO+1
        LDA #SSQHI/256
        STA PSHI+1
        LDA #DSQLO/256
        STA PDLO+1
        LDA #DSQHI/256
        STA PDHI+1

With that done, we can multiply two bytes by putting one in the accumulator and the other in the Y register, and calling this routine:

        STA PSLO     ;Index into sum table by A
        STA PSHI
        EOR #$FF
        STA PDLO     ;Index into diff table by -A-1
        STA PDHI
        LDA (PSLO),Y ;Get (a+y)^2/4 (lo byte)
        SEC
        SBC (PDLO),Y ;Subtract (-a+y)^2/4 (lo byte)
        TAX          ;Save it
        LDA (PSHI),Y ;Get (a+y)^2/4 (hi byte)
        SBC (PDHI),Y ;Subtract (-a+y)^2/4 (hi byte)

This leaves the product in the accumulator (high byte) and the X register (low byte). Worst-case time (all indexing crosses a page boundary): 38 cycles.

The tables necessary to make this work are too long to show here, so I've provided them in a separate text file. Remember, the tables have to be page-aligned, or the above code won't work.

(The above routine is based on some code I found on a Commodore-64-related web page, which, unfortunately, I haven't been able locate again. The method doesn't seem to have been widely known among Apple II programmers.)

But what about negative numbers?

Up to this point, all the code presented in this article has been designed to work with unsigned (positive) numbers. The simple multiply-by-constant routines will also work with negative numbers, but none of the others will. Generally, if you see a LSR or ROR instruction in one of the above routines, it will give wrong results for negative numbers.

The problem is that the 6502's LSR and ROR instructions are not sign-preserving. They could be replaced by calls to subroutines that perform the shift in a sign-preserving manner, but that's probably not the best way to solve the problem.

The usual way to multiply signed numbers on the 6502 is to compute the sign of the result first, then make both numbers positive, multiply them, and apply the proper sign to the result.

Computing the sign of the result is very easy: If the two original numbers have the same sign, the result is positive, and if they have different signs, the result is negative. Assuming the usual two's-complement representation of negative numbers, the sign of the result can be found by EORing the high bytes of the two numbers, which leaves the sign of the result in the high bit of the accumulator and in the N flag.

To make a number positive, first examine its high bit. If the high bit is 0, no action is necessary, otherwise the number will have to negated. The best way to do this depends on where the number is stored - if it's in the accumulator, the quickest way is this:

        EOR #$FF
        CLC
        ADC #1

If the number to be negated is in a memory location, the quickest way to negate it is to subtract it from 0. For example, to negate a two-byte number:

        LDA #0
        SEC
        SBC NUM
        STA NUM
        LDA #0
        SBC NUM+1
        STA NUM+1

Putting it all together, here's a routine that multiplies two signed one-byte numbers, using the one-byte multiply routine from above:

        LDA NUM1     ;Compute sign of result
        EOR NUM2
        PHP          ;Save it on the stack
        LDA NUM1     ;Is NUM1 negative?
        BPL T1
        EOR #$FF     ;If so, make it positive
        CLC
        ADC #1
        STA NUM1
T1      LDA NUM2     ;Is NUM2 negative?
        BPL T2
        EOR #$FF     ;If so, make it positive
        CLC
        ADC #1
        STA NUM2
T2      JSR MUL1BYTE ;Do the unsigned multiplication
        PLP          ;Get sign of result
        BPL T3
        LDA #0       ;If negative, negate result
        SEC
        SBC RESULT
        STA RESULT
        LDA #0
        SBC RESULT+1
        STA RESULT+1
T3      ...

Doing signed division is a bit trickier. The trick is to preserve the following relation:

dividend = divisor * quotient + remainder

In the unsigned case there's only one way to arrange this: The quotient is always less than or equal to the true mathematical quotient (which may have a fractional part), and the remainder is always positive.

In the signed case, the ability to have signed remainders makes the issue murkier. Several conventions are possible, of which two are in common use:

  1. Floored division: If the true mathematical quotient has a fractional part, the quotient is always less than (more negative) or equal to the mathematical quotient, and the remainder has the sign of the divisor.
  2. Toward-zero division: If the true mathematical quotient has a fractional part, the fractional part is truncated (i.e. the quotient is rounded toward zero), and the remainder has the sign of the dividend.

Signed division is implemented with a wrapper around an unsigned routine, as with signed multiplication, but the wrapper varies depending on which convention you choose. In either case, first compute the sign of the quotient the same way you would compute the sign of the result of a multiplication, and then make both numbers positive, and call the unsigned division routine. What happens next depends on which convention you choose.

The code is similar to the signed multiplication example above. (Floored division is more complicated to implement that toward-zero, but many feel that it has superior mathematical properties.)

LLX > Neil Parker > Apple II > Multiplying and Dividing on the 6502

Original: August 31, 2005
Modified: June 2, 2016
Modified: July 4, 2019: Added note on division; expanded the NEED for SPEED section
Modified: October 13, 2020: Fixed typo in signed multiply routine (thanks to David Plass for noticing it).
Modified: November 11, 2024: Fixed long-standing errors in the descriptions of the signed division conventions.