Assembler (68k) help (about dc pseudo op)

[z5]

Don't give up - assembler is hard to learn to start with but once you grasp the basics its a lot of fun.

I recommend to look at the tutorials by Rombust/Nerve Axis which were in later issues of the "Grapevine" diskmag by LSD. They should be on the Aminet somewhere. They are excellent.

And also get some good startup/shutdown code - hardware-banging is great fun but for some reason people tend to not be so happy these days when they quit out of your game/demo and their Workbench screen doesnt come back

Start off with something simple like making some copperbars, then making them move up and down, then displaying a picture, then making a scroller and so on... soon you'll end up with a complete intro that you can release at some party.

Lando, maybe you know that i am webmaster of A.D.A. I've been totally crazy about demos since i saw the first cracktros. So you can imagine that this was a big dream for me. Just being able to make a basic scrolltext would have been cool!

But as said, it's not easy without the right tutorials. I downloaded some sources from internet but they already give an error on assembling in AsmOne  :-(

The code from some very basic intro, with a copperbar and a scrolltext, that would be nice to start. But i think i will give up on that dream.

[Jose]

Thanks all for the help. I'll have to look more into it when I have time, but I defenitly will. It's great fun and I now think people that don't learn to programm miss all the fun. Much cooler than playing games!

[Cymric]

Jose wrote:
snip... I'm learning it cause from what I've always heard, migrating to ppc assembler is a breeze :-D

The question then of course is 'why would you want to code assembly?' Assembly is tough on a programmer because it has you doing everything yourself. Register allocation, memory management, pointer arithmetic. There are little semantic checks. Debugging can be a nightmare, especially if you're writing a demo. Code can be tough to document, and will span many, many lines. Nowadays, only experts (think Real Programmer Mel here) can produce consistently faster assembly code than that of an optimising compiler, and even then the differences are slim.

Of course, there's noone stopping you from learning assembly: by all means, go right ahead, enjoy! Splurge! Smell the bare metal! Bash that blitter! Coerce that Copper! Pounce at Paula :-)! Nevertheless, if you plan to do program development---and that includes demos---on the A1, my advice would be to forget it has a PPC, and just use C or BASIC or any other high(er) level language.

[Jose]

This is much more fun :-D And you learn a lot of stuff, at I do cause my studies are not computer related.
Later I'll learn C. I allways do the opposite normal people do :-D

[Cymric]

Well, okay then. But make sure you do all the nasty stuff only assembly allows you do to. Like writing self-modifying code, or creating code that hooks into the illegal PC-exception vector to have 680x0-code execute at odd addresses. Or one of the many other particularly dirty things :-P.