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Paper magazine poll down, Z80 assembly poll up

by wolf_ on 14-11-2007, 00:48
Topic: MRC
Tags: Polls
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It's the 14th of the month, time for a new poll! Prior to presenting the new poll, let's have a look at the outcome of the poll from October/November. What did our users think about a hypothetical new paper MSX magazine? After 240 votes, here are the final results:

  1. Yes, and I would subscribe to a new MSX magazine 42.5%
  2. Yes, but that time has passed 33.75%
  3. No 23.75%

The majority of voters does miss paper MSX magazines, but there's also a majority who wouldn't subscribe to a new magazine. According to the results there are at least 102 potential subscribers to a classic MSX magazine in the English language, but would that be a sufficient amount to motivate people into making such a magazine? Time will tell..

The new poll is about programming! Would you still like to learn Z80 assembly in order to reach the technical depths of your MSX? Assembly isn't the easiest language to learn, and even the best coder wouldn't automatically be a good teacher for most beginners. This poll is not targeted towards those who already understand assembly, but rather towards active programmers who know MSX-BASIC (or perhaps Pascal, C or any other high-level language) well enough to have the potential to make this next big step. Are you ready? JP Z,Poll

If you have an idea for a interesting poll, send your idea to poll@msx.org and we will consider running your suggestion for a month.

Relevant link: Poll results

Comments (5)

By selios2000

Hero (564)

selios2000's picture

15-11-2007, 11:13

I could design the entire magazine if the project starts someday.

By SLotman

Paragon (1242)

SLotman's picture

15-11-2007, 17:27

Well, it's too late for me to vote (I already know a bit now - Blinky Scary School was totally done in ASM) - But for me it was quite easy to move from Pascal to ASM... specially since most of my Pascal games have TONs of INLINEs, which often I had to disassemble and change them to suit my needs.

But I didnt exactly followed this way. Thinking back now, I also made some small routines in ASM on "Show do Milhão" (which is made in Basic) to speed up the font drawing...

So this is my suggestion: start any project in the language you know/like best - and if the need for best speed or less memory used arises, then try to rewrite the same routine in ASM (start simple: replacing some "IFs", doing some math, etc)

Then you can improve from there, doing RAM transfers, VRAM transfers, drawing sprites, tiles... until you finally take the final leap and do something 100% in ASM Wink

By dvik

Prophet (2200)

dvik's picture

16-11-2007, 18:36

Thats what I did too, then when you are a pro at asm programming, you realize that its much better to do control applications such as game logic in c or pascal instead of asm and only do things that are critical to speed, such as blitters, music etc in asm Smile

By wolf_

Ambassador_ (10092)

wolf_'s picture

16-11-2007, 19:31

But then again, if you create high-level calls in asm, wouldn't that be the same as using C/Pascal function-calls?

By Manuel

Ascended (19299)

Manuel's picture

16-11-2007, 20:23

Yeah, as dvik says, there's no real reason to code stuff that is quite not timing or performance critical in ASM, if you can also code it in a higher level language. So, see it as using C for glue or using asm for the timing/performance critical parts. Sounds more ideal to me than 100% C or 100% ASM!