Crap 0.1 first assembly project

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Seven.FFF
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Re: Crap 0.1 first assembly project

Post by Seven.FFF »

I did CSE Computing in 1984. Apart from the syllabus not requiring you to have touched or even seen a computer, I'm pretty sure octal was on it. And core memory, chain printers, punched cards and tape, etc.
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Re: Crap 0.1 first assembly project

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Teletext magazine numbers and unix file system bitmasks are 3 bit numbers, does that count? (No! Ed.)
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Re: Crap 0.1 first assembly project

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Guesser wrote: Wed Mar 28, 2018 3:28 pm Teletext magazine numbers and unix file system bitmasks are 3 bit numbers, does that count? (No! Ed.)
Tip of the hat to you sir :lol:

That reminds me of a excellent viewdata book I found a while back I will see if I can dig it out...

Lol I remembered the airfield beacon because it was the only octal application I could think of - When I was doing my A-level I was paranoid that it would come up in a question, "Name one application of octal in software" But it never did...
Seven.FFF wrote: Wed Mar 28, 2018 3:22 pm I did CSE Computing in 1984. Apart from the syllabus not requiring you to have touched or even seen a computer, I'm pretty sure octal was on it. And core memory, chain printers, punched cards and tape, etc.
The system charts and most of the systems analysis by the end of the 90s was so out of date, the books still had all of the old symbols in them. But I guess at the time it made a lot of sense because it seemed like everyone who could was cashing in on the year 2000 'certification' scam :lol: so digging through all these crusty old systems was something we all assumed was going to be important 'for years to come' our instructors actually envisaged that we would be spending decades fixing the year 2000 fallout with legacy systems :lol:
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Re: Crap 0.1 first assembly project

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Nomad wrote: Wed Mar 28, 2018 3:41 pm Tip of the hat to you sir :lol:
Tin hat perhaps?

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'Ooligans!
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Re: Crap 0.1 first assembly project

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:D Very nice! The patients something like that must take is really something.

Here is my most pointless 1 liner yet :lol: adapted from the hard work of John Wilson.

Yes its slow, this is BASIC! :lol:

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And the 1 liner Basic/Machine code hybrid.

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Orders of magnitude faster. :lol:
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Re: Crap 0.1 first assembly project

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Another one liner I am afraid.. This one is marginally more useful :lol:

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Re: Crap 0.1 first assembly project

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I wish I had the energy to blog about my daily coding on a sustained basis. If only it was as much fun writing posts as reading yours ;)

I've been stuck working on the same fairly small piece of Next code for the last five weeks. Finally cracked it yesterday, which encouraged me to do the next step, to expand it into a wider system for scripting events... which promptly broke it in an infuriatingly non-obvious way.
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Re: Crap 0.1 first assembly project

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I started it so I had something to keep me accountable to my goals :lol: (to use the new age woo woo talk.)

I didn't really keep up to date with the Next, I thought a number of the features were still undecided. But I guess the boards are already out. Will be really cool to see what people come up with especially now as there is a emulator for the thing right?

Glad someone else can chuckle at my antics.

The one liners are what I do for fun, usually because I forgot something. If I had more skills I would go totally down the Dunning–Kruger rabbit hole and make a bunch of pdf/beamer slides for a youtube presentation. I tend to shy away from that kinda thing because really I don't think I can do it justice. But that never stopped anyone else. :lol:

I loved the masterclass VHS tapes. the guy presenting the videos did it like he was a character from a Dune book accessing some forbidden technology. I kept thinking I would hear the phrase 'Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man's mind' There need to be more youtube videos like that - I know I would watch them. :lol:

[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Tt8TmVc2h8[/media]

Like the Battle of Britain listing, that is pages of notes but I am not sure of the legal situation with that so for now its just on my notepad. Lol What interest anyone else would have in a obscure 82' basic program that got 1/5 in the magazines on release is anyone guess :lol:
I guess I loved it because it was a game from the past that I actually played as a kid I was fascinated how it worked. It took till this year for me to finally look at the whole of the listing. :lol:

I find that frustrating as its on the verge of being an awesome game if it was actually done in assembly. The options could be expanded to make it a full simulation with tons of options. :lol:

Hmm I guess other stuff, I have been getting my makefile shuffle up to standard. That is going to streamline a lot of what previously was tripping me up. :) That and making a hard transition to using zeus :lol:

It all looks like disconnected stuff but in a crazy way it all kinda links in together. Most of these little demos are to do with me being lazy and wanting to find graphics on the rom for free :lol: tonight is just me messing around drawing dragonquest style text boxes. But I plan to use them in crapchess and the battle of Britain knockoff.
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Re: Crap 0.1 first assembly project

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HEh, great. I think you’re are easily distracted by the latest idea as I am :)

I’ve had the Next board since December, but it’s frustrating. There are two partial emulators, which other people are using successfully, but my code has never felt like running on them.

I think it’s easier to start off making stuff that works in the emulator, then it’s likely to mostly work on the hardware. I started the other way round, and seem to have unerringly picked all the unimplemented or buggy features. Ones that make the entire emulator crash and terminate are my speciality!

Zeus only supports the sprites and memory map, but ironically works the best, as the rest degrades gracefully. And it does let me do remote USB debugging, otherwise i’d be lost.

I had an idea yesterday to try and write a frame dumper on the Pi Zero W Next coprocessor, to avoid having to buy a £150 HDMI capture card. The pi has access to the video memory, as you can use it to output a second HDMI screen (it was originally going to be the primary HDMI mechanism, before they integrated that onto the main board).
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Re: Crap 0.1 first assembly project

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I been thinking of getting a Pi zero or a teensy for some music projects. I just ran out of time :lol:

Still if you can save a bunch of money it makes sense to use it, plus I am curious what other monitoring you could get going on the board with that bad boy. Would probably be pretty useful.

I didn't really think much about the next till the tools get a bit more mature, everything is so new like you said I think it will take a few years for stuff to settle down. :lol: Looking forward to ya'll pioneers doing all kinds of awesome stuff in the meantime though.

Another day, another one liner.

This is from last night actually - the next stage is to generalize this one liner to use variable box height.

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After that its time to switch to assembly :lol:
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Re: Crap 0.1 first assembly project

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CCS 2003 games are in my dreams :lol: Having way to much fun.

Messing around with basic some more. You can see the error I made with the box program its re-drawing the whole screen when the player updates. That is wrong. What I should be doing is recording where the XO YO positions were, erasing them them putting the new player pos in XY while keeping the box border.

Another thing I need to fix is using INKEY$ instead of regular input.

Trying to then get all that to work in a one liner will be a pita. :lol:

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Re: Crap 0.1 first assembly project

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My D grade B stock Chinese keyboard decided to pick today to start acting up :lol: Not expecting a lot to get done today..

Still at least its still got some functionality 8-) Will be back on track Monday.
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Re: Crap 0.1 first assembly project

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Figured out how to write disk menu systems today with the +3. Next to get the menu file to auto boot. :lol:

How it works is pretty simple. All it is the menu program merges whatever program is chosen from a series of choices. At the moment it goes to line 1000. This is probably a dumb choice (would have been better to have put it to something like 9950. That way even the largest of programs should not have issues.

Merge is ok but you still run the risk of running out of memory.

Like anything - its not perfect but its good enough.

Eventually I'll have a menu like what you used to get with the +3 multi disks.

It probably makes sense to make this as good as I can do, because I can use it again and again for every disk I make. I should probably make an effort to do this in assembly but honestly I am lazy. :lol:
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Re: Crap 0.1 first assembly project

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Today project time was divided between CCS 2003 and my one liner addiction. :lol:

What's the hard limit on one liners for size with the +3 I think its a little different to the 48k right?

On the plus side I got the chess UDG example converted to a one liner now.

Next task is to see if I can create an entire chess game board as a one liner :lol:

Here are the assembled chessmen. Next step is to try and squeeze this into a 1 liner. :lol:
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Re: Crap 0.1 first assembly project

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Tonight I found one of the most pointless BASIC programs I have ever seen.

Artificial Intelligence on the Spectrum, Chapter 2 first listing. :lol:

It takes a string input, uses an IF THEN control structure to print a string after compairing the input string.. But not in the way you would expect pop pickers... :lol:

You are thinking IF I$="NORTH" THEN PRINT I$... but no..

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I added a clear screen and a slight pause as I like to keep the screen clean. 8-)

Interesting outcome. The first thing I did was try and convert this pointless program into a one liner. But for the life of me I cant figure out why it wont work. :lol:

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Re: Crap 0.1 first assembly project

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Are statements after colons being treated as part of the THEN?
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Re: Crap 0.1 first assembly project

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Yea it seems there is a weird feature of the IF THEN block. In fairness I never knew there was this issue with the IF THEN block with one liners. 8-) I guess it was not so boring after all. :lol:
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Re: Crap 0.1 first assembly project

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I been reading 'House of Leaves'. So I figured it would be nice to see if I could replicate some of the typography style used in the book as a one liner. As its a spectrum program figured it would be good to use different colours just like the book but with different paper values :lol:

Listing.

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Here are a few screens of the program running.

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Improvements:

Well the most obvious thing that can be improved is making sure that A & B can't be equal.
I could add in different sentence string arrays that are selected at random.

After I thought to myself ; "I can cheese my way to another 1 liner with a little change" :lol:

In doing so I found a problem with the earlier program, I was not printing on the whole page.

All I did was use a single graphics character instead of four strings, extended the X Y values to cover as much as the screen as I could. Badabing badaboom - new one liner. 8-)

Listing:
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Screen:
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But then why just use CHR$(143)? Why not use all the graphics chars you get for free :lol:

Listing:
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Screen:
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Re: Crap 0.1 first assembly project

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Ha excellent. The cutout effect would work really well with the Next's 3 layers and global transparency.

I love the Navidson house sections in that book so much.
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Re: Crap 0.1 first assembly project

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Yes I really enjoyed the book, I like things where you can interpret them on lots of different levels/ways. It is stunning that one guy wrote it. No wonder it took so long. It is a shame he didn't write more about his process. I figure the planning alone of the various layers of narrative must have taken years.

I had always hoped that games would be created of similar complexity but who knows what the future will bring. With all these ARG type multi media projects in the last 10 years or so I think perhaps in the next few decades one will be created that will use multiple media channels to tell the story. It's just a matter of time.

I will need to take a look at the next and see what is possible, it sounds pretty cool. Kind of like a neo-geo type specification.
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Re: Crap 0.1 first assembly project

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One question I had was could a game/application be developed to trigger a behavioral contagion event in the user? It has always been a subject of speculation if such a thing is possible without the use of chemical aids. I think in theory it should given the right stimulation work with susceptible individuals. Then it would just be a matter of enough susceptible individuals being in a social network that can share the program.

But then again if it were indeed easy to trigger it would already be widely used in viral marketing.

To be able to determine a individuals nature (extrovert/introvert) from game play would be critical. (extroverts are the most susceptible to behavioral contagion, introverts are far less likely because of personality type to become a vector...)
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Re: Crap 0.1 first assembly project

Post by Ast A. Moore »

Social networks already do that. The advantage of social networks over games is that far more people use them. Sharing scores/achievements online is the simples way of introducing behavioral contagion into games by exploiting a natural incentive.
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Re: Crap 0.1 first assembly project

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Yea I remember Farmville was probably the first online one I felt was diabolical in that regard. I had colleagues and friends begging me to get a facebook just so they could add me in this Skinner box app :lol: Whenever I would see these type of applications at first I think the reaction is disgust but then a part of me wishes I had thought it up because it would be a ticket to riches :lol: I am sure the creator of these apps are crying to their respective therapists over the guilt of manipulating all these plebs :lol:

But I guess now its candy crush.
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Re: Crap 0.1 first assembly project

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So following a thread on here I got round to reading through the rather wonderful Spectrum Trade Secrets.

Check this out..

Spectrum +3 BASIC...

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Spectrum 48k BASIC...

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Works in 48k but 3+ basic it fails hard. :lol:

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is it a case of..

Image :lol:

I am guessing its because the memory map is subtly different with the +3..

Time to check if 23759,23760,23761,23762 are being left empty with the +3 looking at the output I think I am off by a few bytes...
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Re: Crap 0.1 first assembly project

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Images are not showing up for me, even on postimage’s site. My curiosity is whetted now though, dammit!
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