Toe dipping!

ASM development for the Commodore Amiga
Post Reply
robsoft
Posts: 8
Joined: Wed Apr 24, 2019 10:56 pm

Toe dipping!

Post by robsoft » Thu May 16, 2019 1:19 pm

Okay, over the past couple of weeks I found enough time to start a bit of Amiga assembly, first up I was sending ANSI control codes to the terminal window to move a cursor around and 'type' text, then I got Paula to make a few bleeps and beeps.

Now I'm going to have a go with the screen/bitmap tutorial and see how I get on, time to start up-skilling!

Previously I've followed Proton/Scoopex' tutorials but there were chunks of it I didn't understand, so this time instead of racing towards some kind of outcome I'm just trying to make sure I actually 'get' it. I'm using VS Code and the Amiga Assembler plug in, with VASM and FS-UAE on a Mac (I can dump out to a real A500 via a CF card when I fancy trying it on the real thing).
As a quick and painless way to get a toolchain going, I can highly recommend it (I haven't tried Keith's toolchain yet but I will give it a go one evening, it's broadly very much like what I'm using anyway).

It was also a big help to get hold of the RKM books for the Amiga, and 'see' where the various hardware chip register values and things come from - in the context of a bigger explanation it makes sense and finally I think I understand what I'm doing. (ha ha).
robsoft : weareroad.co.uk

User avatar
akuyou
Posts: 563
Joined: Mon Apr 22, 2019 3:19 am
Contact:

Re: Toe dipping!

Post by akuyou » Fri May 17, 2019 3:34 am

Great to hear you're having fun programming

Please feel free to post links to any tutorials or other resources you think may help others... I tend to link my own tutorials, but there's many other great (and probably better) tutorials out there, and everyone's learning style is different.

Really, the main thing that got me started was the example code here:
https://www.reaktor.com/blog/crash-cour ... ogramming/
which is great, but it's not 4 bits per pixel, which was very confusing!

I'm not sure I'm familiar with the RKM books, I've got various stuff I use as PDF's... if they are online, or for sale somewhere, please let me know, and I'll take a look.

Good luck with your programming!
Chibi Akuma(s) Comedy-Horror 8-bit Bullet Hell shooter! // 「チビ悪魔」可笑しいゴシックSTG ! // Work in Progress: ChibiAliens

Interested in CPU's :Z80,6502,68000,6809,ARM,8086,RISC-V
Learning: 65816,ARM,8086,6809

robsoft
Posts: 8
Joined: Wed Apr 24, 2019 10:56 pm

Re: Toe dipping!

Post by robsoft » Fri May 17, 2019 8:36 am

Sorry Keith - by RKMs I just meant the 'Rom Kernel Manual', Commodore's official hardware reference book and the various similar books covering the roms, software libraries etc.
I think you've linked to them already but I'll link them here;

iKod archive
I managed to get hold of paper copies of some of the 2nd edition 'blue' ones (the actual Hardware one in particular) as I'm a bit old school and like to litter a book with temporary yellow post-it tabs while I'm flitting about. I've never found a good way of doing that with a PDF, even with multiple instances open etc etc.
The books are expensive though, on eBay they cost as much now as they did when new (as a teenager I had a couple of them and they were expensive and quite hard to find).

I saw the 'Reaktor' tutorial too, that was a starter for me but I found it wasn't explained in enough depth (or I was too thick) to really get some of it.

The Photon tutorials are on YouTube, and although I think they start off a bit odd (he's in Asm One right from the first instant), it gets fleshed out well enough, he has a toolchain available and within a few lessons things are ticking over and making a degree of sense. Ultimately he gets on to ProTracker replaying, bobs, copper list, converting ILBM (eg Deluxe Paint images) to raw bitplane data to include in your source, etc etc. It's good stuff (and runs for about 40 tutorials I think) but at a certain point I realised I needed to understand the simple stuff in the processor just as much as I needed to understand the hardware chips etc.

Photon of Scoopex, Amiga hardware programming (1/40+)
The downloads, examples, toolchain etc

What I appreciate about your tutorials is there is some explanation for each step, even if it's 'this does this, we'll cover it properly later' and you have gone to the trouble to talk about instructions in the processors themselves as much as (possibly more so) than the 'interesting' bits of the various hardware systems themselves. I don't know about everyone else but to start with I was 'quick win' and eager to get to the scrolly sine-wave text stuff as quickly as possible but soon found I didn't understand something fundamental in the code (I spent a while stuck because I'd modified some of Photon's code and the compiler wouldn't let me 'branch' off to my label as it was now too far away. Because I hadn't really understand the branch instructions and how the relative jumps worked, I felt stuck. Watching your tutorial on this area helped to unstick me).

I'm hoping to be at the Nova demoparty in about 5 weeks time (I've paid for a ticket, transport may yet be a problem!) and it would be nice to take a really simple 'greetz' demo; a copperlist, a scrolltext, a logo, a ProTracker module and maybe bobs etc. I'm not going to have much in the way of programming chops so I'm hoping to inject a bit of personality, humour or somewhat left-field design into it, instead. Of course, real life keeps getting in the way from a free-time perspective so I'm half-resigned to being there only as an observer :-(
robsoft : weareroad.co.uk

Post Reply

Return to “Amiga Assembly Programming”