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:lol: Apart from the games written in assembly language :P.

 

Oh, there are plenty of *games* written in ASM. I just don't see people discussing them very much on this forum. All of that chatter seems to take place in the flashcart threads, and such. ;)

 

Nah, I'm just horsing around. I'm feeling a bit guilty that a small handful of us have basically taken over this forum recently.

Edited by freeweed
  • Like 1

I'm of two thoughts. Programming is programming, but Nanochess has created something unique and deserving of a sub forum since a lot of the traffic lately has been IntyBasic, both beginner stuff and low level technical discussion. However the technical discussion of things like memory maps is valuable to any programmers, not just Basic ones. Having to pick, I say IntyBasjc sub forum under The existing sub forum for programming like. Nanochess suggested.

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People make Inty games in something besides BASIC? :o

 

Well... I still look forward to IntyBASIC games being on cartridge. It'll happen... but it hasn't happened yet. :-)

 

 

It should have enough traffic to warrant a subforum. At quick glance I do see quite a bit of IntyBasic posts just in the first page of Intellivision Programming topics, so on that alone it may be a good idea.

 

True, but that's due to a lack of posts otherwise. Move IntyBASIC to its own forum and we're left mostly with Aquarius ZX BASIC posts any more. ;-) I exaggerate, but only slightly.

 

Seriously, this forum doesn't see nearly the traffic that the main Intellivision forum gets.

 

Anyone interested in Intellivision programming in general won't have too hard a time finding something interesting to them currently, scrolling through a page or two of posts. New topics on here are infrequent enough that I really don't see the need to fragment it.

 

Oh, there are plenty of *games* written in ASM. I just don't see people discussing them very much on this forum. All of that chatter seems to take place in the flashcart threads, and such. ;)

 

Nah, I'm just horsing around. I'm feeling a bit guilty that a small handful of us have basically taken over this forum recently.

 

Well, folks are free to ask questions about assembly programming, certainly. I think the folks that are comfortable about programming in assembly are apparently quite content, and the folks hesitant about assembly have gravitated to IntyBASIC.

 

No need to feel guilty.

 

The underlying machine is still the same, and the design issues it presents, such as allocating MOBs and GRAM tiles, and making graphics work with the tile-based BACKTAB are language neutral.

 

It's too bad P-Machinery hasn't gotten more attention. I feel like assembly has a stigma around it as seeming harder than it is. *shrug* Assembly syntax is quirky, but there really isn't much to it. Maybe that's it—it doesn't really offer any abstraction, so you have to build your own, because there really is so little to assembly language on its own. P-Machinery offers high level abstractions, but really basic stuff like addition, multiplication, and if-then-else still require knowing how to write the constructs at a lower level.

 

I have tried to provide a shallower on-ramp to assembly here: http://wiki.intellivision.us/index.php?title=Programming_Tutorials

 

That said, the tutorials still aren't quite as approachable as introductory books on the topic. If you know what shifts are, how address maps work, what registers are, then you can quickly breeze through those tutorials. If it's all new, my brief introductions to these topics are likely too brief. It took a lot to write what's there. Writing more would be a multiple-months long effort, as opposed to a few weeks.

 

I've been doing this so long that many concepts just seem natural to me, which makes it harder to really "start at the beginning." After all, I've been programming assembly language since before I was in high school. At this point I'm probably not as good a judge as I could be of what assembly concepts are difficult and what ones aren't.

Edited by intvnut
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You speak truth. I'm of similar background, but I haven't kept it up. I still think in terms of bitshifts and doing all math as integers and making sure you don't have to move outside of your register scope unnecessarily. Regardless of what features the underlying hardware may bring that makes some of this thinking a lot less valuable than it used to be.

 

And yet.. because it's been so damned long, and because I've gotten sloppy - man it's just so nice to lazily bang out a loop. Do conditional logic with minimal keystrokes (and not really pay attention to what's happening beneath). I've said it before, but because you still need to pay close attention to the STIC and PSG at a register level, IntyBASIC still feels very much like programming close to the metal. And it doesn't seem to add the overhead that some HLLs do (let alone BASIC back when it was all interpreted) - the only real "overhead" is in terms of ROM space, possibly, and that isn't exactly a concern these days. Maybe some of the more fancy GRAM tricks you guys do would be more difficult in IntyBASIC, but quite frankly the thought of writing that in assembler seems daunting anyway.

 

I took a peek at P-Machinery. What I think it offers in terms of control structures and timing interests me highly. I'd love to have that kind of framework in IntyBASIC, instead of re-inventing it with each new game.

 

And about the tutorials, you're exactly right. Having been formally trained in assembly, I read them a while ago and thought "hey this isn't so bad". But still... for the kinds of things I'm already able to do, it'd take me 5x as long. And I suspect I'd have lost interest by now, just because it would feel like work. With IntyBASIC sometimes I can bang out half a dozen lines and implement an entirely new feature. It's really kept me interested in this. I can't imagine how you'd get a complete newbie into this stuff, not these days anyway. Although I do think these old 8/16 bit architectures are a MUCH better into to ASM than anything current.

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The promise of P-Machinery is in high-level abstractions and pre-built functional modules that support specific game features.

 

For instance, abstracting Sprites as objects with autonomous velocity control and boundary/collision detection.

 

Sure, game logic is in Assembly, but that's nothing that a bit of magic integration with a compiler can't fix. I imagine a future where P-Machinery games are compiled in IntyBASIC, C, or a custom programming language.

 

We're not there yet, but we will. :)

 

dZ.

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