BBC BASIC for Windows
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its all so complicated and involved
Post by leslie griffin on Jan 7th, 2010, 11:35pm

maybee I just want "the good old days" or maybee my lost youth...but i seem to remember making my electron do some amazing things with just an average understanding of assembler.Now, it just seems like hard work to do anything slightly complicated regarding prograqmming.
Ill keep plugging away with BBC BASIC but ive also just bought a new super duper Acorn Electron with expanded bits and bobs...OK its snail paced..but programming in ass..with a memory mapped screen, was always so much fun.
regards to all programmers.......Leslie
Re: its all so complicated and involved
Post by softweir on Jan 8th, 2010, 01:26am

I know what you mean! During the last few weeks since I bought BB4W I've been spending too much time thinking, re-thinking, writing, trying, discarding - and it seems like hard work. All of that used to be FUN!

However, I have been persisting and am starting to find some old programming neurons that are still there. Beer-bellied couch-potatoes they may have become, but they have finally hauled themselves off the couch, and even if they are a long way from scampering around the way they used to, at least they have managed to haul on some trainers and waddle their way to the front door.

Good luck and stick with it!

Richard W.
Re: its all so complicated and involved
Post by admin on Jan 8th, 2010, 08:14am

Quote:
maybee I just want "the good old days" or maybee my lost youth...but i seem to remember making my electron do some amazing things with just an average understanding of assembler.Now, it just seems like hard work to do anything slightly complicated regarding prograqmming.

Surely the simplest and most likely explanation is that you have got older (I am very conscious of my 'waning powers')! I genuinely don't believe that 'simple' assembler programming on a PC (by which I mean avoiding the more esoteric instructions) is any more difficult than assembler programming on an Electron. Being able to work with 32-bit values rather than 8-bit values can actually make things easier.

Another thing to bear in mind is that things which you had to do in assembler code on an Electron, for reasons of speed, you can often do in plain BASIC on a PC because it's so much faster.

Give us an example of something that you've found difficult. It may be that there's an easier way of doing it.

Richard.
Re: its all so complicated and involved
Post by Ken Down on Mar 29th, 2010, 12:25pm

One reason it is so difficult is that you are learning a different assembler. On the Electron you had the assembler for a 6502 processor; now you have comletely different commands (and more of them) for an entirely different CPU.

As someone else has pointed out, unless you are into games, and pretty high-powered ones at that, you don't really need assembler. CPU clock speeds have increased so dramatically since the "gold old days" that something which you really had to do in machine code to get a decent speed on the Electron, you can now do in BASIC, complete with REMs, spaces and long variable names for readability!