Ok everyone,
I might have been a little hasty when I told you Assembly Language is your friend! Assembler/Editor is not really your friend! It’s more like an old high school friend that actually wasn't your friend and ended up stealing your girlfriend and taking her to prom!! Ok, I think you get idea... Assembly Language is incredibly unforgiving and hard to figure out, it’s like trying to learn hieroglyphics... no, it’s like trying to learn Egyptian Hieroglyphics! It is so different than anything I have ever tried to learn in such a short time that I can feel my head start to swell. Don’t get me wrong, I still love it but it’s going to be a challenge. I think I saw a quote somewhere that said, “I would rather go through med school than learn to program in Assembly language!” Boy, that’s encouraging! At least one nice thing about learning a new language is that there are a lot of resources out there. Like Beth, if I was to name a main one! You can find a bunch of books on programming Assembly Language through eBay, Amazon, and Google but you have to really look hard. Plus, you have to know what you are looking for, there are a lot of books out there but they’re not all great! Believe me, I have a few bombs in my collection and that also goes for Applesoft Basic and Apple Graphics books.
A couple of great resources I found on Amazon.com were two Assembler Language books. I have other really good books but these two are going to be essential when it comes time to getting Ultima 1 Revisited up and running.
The books are:
1. Hi-Res Graphics and Animation using Assembly Language – Leonard Malkin PhD
2. Apple II Assembly Language Exercises – Leo J. Scanlon
I think these two books are going to be excellent sources of information concerning leaning to code in assembly language and putting graphics on the screen. Already, I can tell that Leonard Malkin’s book is going to be perfect! I will be reviewing these two books later and posting the reviews.
One of the great things about Leo Scanlon’s book is it’s written entirely around the Apple DOS TOOL KIT Assembler Editor! His exercises were written and tested using this exact software application so you have a direct resource into programming with the DOS TOOL KIT. Believe me; this is critical because the documentation that comes with the Assembler/Editor has no example code what so ever! The manual only covers definitions and verbiage. I could not find anything on programming with the DOS TOOL KIT until I found this book. I literally spent the better part of two days just getting error statements when I tried to enter a simple sample code! You cannot believe who frustrating it is to enter a command and immediately get an error, over and over and OVER again! This was mind numbing! Finally I had a light bulb moment “after rereading the manual eight times!” and something clicked, after that it all started to become clear. Then, once I received the Exercise book it REALLY became clear and I was able to enter some sample codes that would run through the assembler successfully. Hoo-rah!
This brings me to my next point… Everyone who is following this blog should be able to find a good Apple II emulator on the internet and also the .dsk image of the Apple DOS TOOL KIT. I’ve tested both of these applications and they work fine, they are little hard to get use to but they will work. With these two applications you should be able to follow along with me when I start posting code and examples. I highly recommend you get these two applications and get them ready to start programming. I will try to give as much insight into the process as I can just to make it easier. My goal is not to make everyone an Assembly Language programmer; no… my goal is to make available all the Applesoft Basic and Assembly code so everyone can program their own copy of Ultima 1 Revisited!!!
So stay tuned and get ready!
Joe
No comments:
Post a Comment