[I think I mistyped port-mips address when i added it back
 to this subthread; sorry about htat..]


Anyway, i tried the obvious placebo pattern on a few assemblers.  The
mips CPU instruction set has no `la' (load address) but the assembler
synthesizes one.  So I tried

	    la	  $4,  32800($4)

and
	    la	  $4,  132800($4)

on an Ultrix mipsco assembler and binutils-2.8.1 gas.  the mipsco
assembler DTRT. (Actually, it handles results less than 65535
specially, by loading 32767 and then adding the residual; for
the larguer value it does a lui/addiu pair:

      lui	at, 2
      addiu    $4, at, 1728)

but gas from binutils-2.8.1 and 2.9.1 both produce bad code-- they
just emit a "li 0x8020", which sign-extends to -32736.

Damn and blast....