Learning to code on the Amiga

[Corrie]

Hi all,

For those of you who have some skill in coding in ASM on the Amiga, is there a very good tutorial for it anywhere, that explains the basics right through to advanced, aswell as the programs you need to compile and edit code?

Any reccomendations?

[Amiga1200PPC]

Forget it.
Coding in Asm is not recommendable.
Try at least C.
Even better would be something like C++, Modula2 or Oberon2.
If you don't know any high level language, your Asm or C programs will be utmost crap.
You program with a compiler language which are normally fast enough, if you really need hand written asm you simply rewrite some of the functions of your program in asm after it is running stable in the higher level language.

[alx]

@Corrie

While I'm not much of a programmer myself, I agree entirely with Wishmaster.  ASM isn't known for being easy to learn or portable (try porting that ASM app from 68k Amiga to A1/Peg :-) )  Of course if you're writing a hardware-hitting demo then that won't exactly matter...

BTW there's an ongoing C tutorial in Total Amiga magazine.

[thorrin]

Waaaay back in 1993, I downloadad an Amiga 'C' tutorial off of aminet.  Very nice indeed and it was very well written.  I only have a hardcopy of it now.

If you REALLY want to learn assembly, I have a book here called Amiga Machine Language.  It was published by Abacus in 1990.  It shows you intuition stuff like windows, event handling, requestors, etc and disk IO.  Pretty dern nice book, BUT I would STRONGLY recommend that you experiment with 'C' first.  I learned the basics of programming in 'C' and then kinda translated some things into ASM.  Much easier that way

Of course, you may be a better programmer than I was back then, but with the 'C' code, it was easier to focus on the structures and stuff that was going on as opposed to having to learn structures AND fight 68000 Assembly at the same time.

-Thorrin

[Skippy]

I've got some stuff for you on my website: here

Aminet is also a good point of reference and I can't remember which issue but LSD's Grapevine magazine ran a tutorial on programming.

I 'was' a 680xx coder between 1991-97ish and have quite a large resource of reference material that I archived, which incidently I was thinking of sorting out and uploading some day.

Have a word with this guy

http://www.petergordon.org.uk/

he's a very good ASM coder, hi pete

Skippy

.moo: BTST #6,$BFE001
BNE.S .moo

Mmmm, interesting Mr Bond...

[Jose]

Hey! Cool, so I'm not the only one learning assembler these days...
I started last year but don't have much time.
Didn't found a comprehensive tutorial thgout but
"Mastering Amiga Assemble"r by Paul Overaa is a  GREAT book!

There are some very good tutorials on Aminet but they omit some stuff IMO.

 

[Monoxyde]

alx wrote:

BTW there's an ongoing C tutorial in Total Amiga magazine.

Yes, and since it's only three months between each lessons you'll become a good programmer in, say, 10 years ;-)

If the author of the tutoral is following this thread (DaveP, or is my RAM failing me?), would it be possible to make the entire tutorial available on the website for subscribers of TAM? If it's already written, that is. It's just too long to wait a year or so to get into the fun parts.

[that_punk_guy]

You could look at car boot sales, etc for old copies of CU Amiga or AF, they ran a lot of tutorials over the years...

[amigau]

there's quite a bit on our site as well, including some downloadable code samples, depending on the language at issue:

http://www.amigau.com/c-programming/cphome.html

kevin orme
amiga university
www.amigau.com

[Trev]

You'll want to track down a dealer that carries the latest Amiga Developer CD. Then head over to Motorola's semiconductor site and grab the 680x0 documentation (check the Design Support link). Finally, head over to Aminet and search for an assembler. I don't have my dev CD handy to check, but there might be an assembler on there as well.

GoldED is a popular text editor / IDE.

Trev

[Prod]

Yo there, and welcome to the wonderful world of professional
programming. :-)
This should be a good place to start, tutorials and cool downloads:
http://www.algonet.se/~chaozer/assembler.html
And btw, forget about C and its cheap clones, its older than me and
beyond useless, its main purpose nowadays is to make new
versions of Windows and related horrors, if its a headache you want
you should rather just install a few Linuxes or something. :-)
For the best of Assemblers i would suggest the amazing Devpac 3, it is
very cheap these days:
http://www.hisoft.co.uk

[twizzle]

 why dont you try st andrews university in scotland
 they have got loads of amiga programming stuf
 on the amiga.
 mike

[wildstar1063]

I was thinking about learning assembler the other day
 and went looking for a tutorial and found this:


Amiga Assemlber Tutorial

The tutorials are at the bottom

Chuck

[iamaboringperson]

Corrie wrote:
Hi all,

For those of you who have some skill in coding in ASM on the Amiga, is there a very good tutorial for it anywhere, that explains the basics right through to advanced, aswell as the programs you need to compile and edit code?

Any reccomendations?

I'm just wondering why you want to program in ASM?

If you learn 680x0 code now, you will only need to learn PowerPC in the future.

You would be much better learning C or C++, and then you can usually use the exact same code that you use on AOS 3.x on MorphOS 1.0+

[Karlos]

Whilst I feel that writing entire apps in asm is purely for the insane / demo coder, you can't know too much. It's worthwhile knowing asm, even if only for debugging compiler output.

Primarily I program in C++, then C. However, once any piece of software becomes specialised for a system, the dependency issue largely is out of your hands anyway.

Then you find that sometimes, no matter how efficient your algorithms in C/C++ code, some intensive function call is still too slow, especially if you are developing for a 680x0 system say.

Knowing asm is good for these situations especially. You keep the C++ code and conditionally compile away the C++ function definition when compiling for the system you wrote the asm version for.

Your project is still portable, just fine tuned on the particular implementations.