Bcd

The other day I was discussing my project with one of my relatives. I was telling him how I am being extravagant with memory and speed because I created a structure to represent and work with angles in degrees minutes seconds format. Basically it gets rid of some conversion errors and that annoying thing with binary representation not operating exactly how we'd think about things in base 10. Well anyway, I told him that my system work similarly to BCD, Binary Coded Decimal, and that I probably would have used BCD instead except the code for it would have been more complex. Later he mentioned how long ago he did some work for a bank or something and he discovered that the processor had provisions to work directly in BCD.

He mentioned something about loading AX and 32 bits, so I assumed it was for a 80386 based system. My question is:

Do you folks know anything of this? Is it just a fading memory that is not entirely correct?

The x86 architecture does indeed support BCDs directly. I don't know how well, though, and I especially don't know if x86-64 still does it. Probably does (backwards compatibility and all that), but I doubt anyone really cares about the functionality.