¶N¤¢01ž02CODING - A GUIDE LINE!ž01


¢02 Written by: ¢03Spirit/Devious.

¢01 What you need:

¢02 The  most popular assembler, I always
 use  '¢03ASM-One V1.16¢02' + I started with
¢03 SEKA¢02, but its not very user friendly.
 Then  I  atempted DevPack, devpack is
 very  nice  but  ¢15ASM¢02  is the best and
 most widely used .

 The next thing is the '¢03Amiga Hardware
 Reference  Manual¢02',  this  is where I
 learnt  most  of  my hardware coding,
 how        to       program       the
 audio,blitter,copper  etc.   This  is
 the  official  Amiga inc.  manual , I
 also  have the Abacus '¢03Amiga System -
 Programmer's   Guide¢02'  ,  both  books
 contain  the  same  information about
 hardware,  however the Abacus edition
 covers  a  lot  of  operating  system
 programming,   and  how  to  use  the
 system  functions  for  screens,files
 etc.   I  would  buy the Abacus since
 its  got  a  lot  more in it apart of
 hardware.

 You  also  need information about the
 motorola   instruction  set,  I  have
 bought  a  couple  of  amiga oriented
 books    which    cover    the    cpu
 instructions   and  a  lot  of  other
 things  .   Actualy  the  only useful
 stuff  in   the  Computer's  'Machine
 language  programming  guide'  is the
 cpu   instructions   ,  the  rest  of
 program  examples  is  quite useless,
 but  helps when programming operating
 system friendly stuff.  But since the
 age  of  the  Amiga1200  it  would be
 worth    to    covering   the   680x0
 instructions.

 Finaly  a tool that comes in handy is
 an  iff converter, this tool converts
 iff  pictures into raw format, in raw
 format  ,  all  you  do  is  load the
 picture into memory , set the colours
 and its ready to display.

 If   you  have  these  your  ready to
 teach yourself coding!

 What  I  did to start with is all the
 fun examples out of the Ref.  manual,
 like  making  a  copper list , making
 colour  lines (¢01raster lines¢02) with the
 copper   .   Then  making  a  picture
 appear  on  the screen, etc using the
 blitter.

 At this point you need a lot of scene
 support  ,  you  need to develop your
 own  general  routines , you may also
 want  to  play a module .  Almost all
 coders  use  someone elses mod replay
 routine  to  play  mods.  And it also
 pays  to  investigate the startup and
 exit routines of other pro.  coders .

 About  now  it  gets  difficult , and
 many  that  got this far simply quit.
 Things never work , you dont know how
 certain  stuff  is coded and thats it
 eh ?

 Practice  makes perfect, keep trying,
 by  the  way , this needs commitment.
 Its  not like doing homework , if you
 dont  make  a  commitment  , you only
 fool yourself.

¢03 A common guidline.....¢02

¢03 "there  is  always  new  routines  to
 learn, ALWAYS!"
¢01 "there is always room to optimise"
¢03 "there is always room to improve"
¢01 "there is almost always a bug!"
¢03 "there  is always a quick hack to fix
 a bug"
¢01 "the  above  mentioned  quick hack is
 realy a bigger bug"
¢03 "it  always takes some time to figure
 out how your old routines work"
¢01 "bugs are a natural inhabitant of all
 code"
¢03 "¢15FACT¢03:   ¢01'MOVE.l  #0,0'¢03  crashes  any
 AMIGA with WB 1.3 or less"¢02

 I  would  like  to  take  the time to
 include some basic routines, but why,
 it  wont  benefit you or me !  Unless
 you have the books , or relevant text
 files  to teach yourself how to do it
 its only the same as copying homework
 from  the  guy  that  always gets top
 marks , but you never learn how to do
 the work.

 This whole process accelerates if you
 have  a  coder in your group that can
 give  you  a  lesson  or  two  ,  for
 example , in the beginning ¢03PSYCHE¢02 had
 absolutely  no  idea of what I code ,
 but as time goes on hes learnt things
 here  and  there  ,  and  now  he can
 understand  this  vision  mag  source
 quite  well.   In  fact  ,  if ¢03PSYCHE¢02
 didnt  know  anything, this mag would
 never ge to you.  After all , even my
 patience breaks, coding the thing and
 puting   in   the   text  design  and
 graphics  is  gonna make my hair like
 einsteins,  I only code the stuff and
 teach how to finalise the design !  I
 dont  tare  my  hair  out  over  what
 colour  to use , ey ¢03PSYCHE¢02.  Ofcourse
 ¢03KiTSUNE¢02 writes the mod !  Imagine the
 mod file created by a coder!