Jump to content
IGNORED

Oscar's boot sector game books


Recommended Posts

Hey all -

 

Anyone have these books?  Will these books help me understand IntyBasic better because isn't Intellivision coding rooted in assembly language?  I still have a tough times understand how some of the more intricate Intybasic coding works despite how well it is explained, and maybe this might help bridge the gap?

 

Even if they don't, seems like interesting books to tackle and I have no problem throwing money at Oscar.....his stuff is great.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

@nanochess probably can tell for sure, but those boot sector books refers to the X86 architecture found in IBM PCs. Some claim that if you have learned one form of assembly language, you can easily learn any other but from my personal experience they all differ quite a bit regarding instruction sets, flags, registers, programming principles etc so it takes a bit of dedication to go from one to the other. I'm somewhat fluent in 6502, and have proven to understand individual instructions in e.g. CP1610 or X86 but could never write a complete program. At best I can make simple hacks. In my case, the same goes for e.g. Z80, 1802, F8, 6803/6809 (despite being so close to 6502) etc. I can't recall if I ever even attempted 8048. I took one or two university courses in 68000 but despite being an Amiga owner for nearly 30 years I never seriously tried to get into assembly language programming onto it.

 

I don't think you'll understand IntyBASIC much more by getting into assembly language, but you certainly could study the assembler listing generated by the compiler to tell how it translated your program and if you're an advanced user, how you could manually insert blocks of assembly language into your program that is even more optimized than what the compiler is able to generate. In rare cases you can even use this as a way to extend the language, e.g. like some routines for plotting text or the small hack I made the other year for dynamically selecting a song to play.

 

But yes, if you have any interest in older DOS PCs or generally like the idea of having a bookshelf full of Oscar's books, I'm sure those books are valuable additions.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

11 hours ago, Mik's Arcade said:

Hey all -

 

Anyone have these books?  Will these books help me understand IntyBasic better because isn't Intellivision coding rooted in assembly language?  I still have a tough times understand how some of the more intricate Intybasic coding works despite how well it is explained, and maybe this might help bridge the gap?

 

Even if they don't, seems like interesting books to tackle and I have no problem throwing money at Oscar.....his stuff is great.

I have these books.  They won't help you with IntyBASIC though.

 

Basically everything is rooted in Assembly language, when you think about it.  The thing about Assembly is that it's specific to the architecture you're building on.  The Assembly books use 8086 (nothing higher, save the Chess example which uses 80186), whereas Intellivision is CP1610.  Moreover, the games in the Assembly books use unconventional coding tricks to fit all the games into 510 bytes of object code.

 

Your best way to learn IntyBASIC better is through experience.  Keep writing code and finding out what works well and what doesn't.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

My boot sector games books have helped many people to learn x86 assembly language for the first time in many years.

 

Unfortunately the x86 field is vastly different from IntyBASIC, so I wouldn't recommend them for enhancing your IntyBASIC comprehension.

 

However if you show fragments of the code you don't understand I'll be happy to clarify it or give you an idea of how it works.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

thanks.

 

I will still get those books because I'd like to tinker with them, but I will focus on IntyBasic for now.    :)

 

But yeah, I'm trying to work on small, simpler games to learn one concept at a time.  I'm getting decent at understanding how to move around and manipulate sprites on the screen now, in particular on how to use DATA statement to store specific values needed to make the code less cumbersome.  I'm glad I shifted focus away from Marathon game for the time being.  I was getting too caught up on trying to make nice looking sprites.  I'll stick with really simple ones for now

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I will ask this IntyBasic question:

 

Ok, take a game like Space Armada.  With the 8 sprite limit, how are they able to make 4 rows of 8 aliens, have them drop lasers and be able to destroy your bases.  The first game I was working on was a clone of that, and I was able to lay out all the aliens on cards, but that was it.  Had no idea how to make them move, shoot, etc.  I have to assume that the aliens are not sprites, but just static cards that keep switching ON FRAME or something?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The alien are probably preshifted x position graphic loaded to GRAM and then the card get printed to BACKTAB. I think the y position is shifted by 8 pixels. That's the quickest way to print many of them in a frame.

I'm wrong, the shields, laser, bomb, and the craft is sprites.  I was thinking of Astrosmash where the score and the lives were presents on screen.  The aliens are shifted using the SCROLL command.  And the alien animation are loaded into GRAM.  You can check in the manual.txt and see the SCROLL function.  Also, there's a sample source code in the sample folder.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...