Saxonia Issue 01 Part 011

Published in

· 5 years ago

  

A better start 
By Rumrunner/VOID 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

Maybe some of you remember the article Bacchus/Fairlight wrote many years 
back, about Commodore 64 being a better start for coders than the Amiga. 
As you may have read in other articles in this mag. I have had some 
(or many) problems getting the code to this mag to work properly. 

And also I have had problems with some simple routines for the demo I'm 
working on : The VOIDS are back in town. 

I also think that the Commodore 64 would have been a better place to start, 
with much less things to think about. But I also think that the Amiga 500 
is worth solid gold in this case. You have much less to worry about when 
you make your routines for A500. No VBR register, better chance that your 
assembler and OS will still run even though your programs writes to 
unallocated memory because of a little bug in you routine, and so on. 

When I switched my first every routine in assembler to an interrupt routine 
instead of waiting for the vertical blanking interval in the mail loop, 
nothing happened, and I didn't know whether this was because of the 
interrupt handler itself or something wrong with my code to find the 
VBR. But a quick look at the routine on my A500, I found that the handler 
worked there, and then I knew where to find the error. Not long after, 
the little routine also worked on the A1200. 

Programs such as NoAGA KillAGA, and possibly other degraders too are 
important when you're new at coding. They, or a real Amiga500 decreases 
the possible sources for error dramatically in some cases. 

This might be useful to know for others who are learning 68000 assembler 
these days. Hopefully, we will get more coders in the future, and then 
it's important that they get their stuff to work before they are tired of 
not seeing any results. 

Also, a little advice to good coders : why not try to help beginners. It's 
a good investment in the Amiga Scene for the future. 

 
Rumrunner/VOID