Assembler course

by Wanja Gayk Hi! I hope you've brought some time with you because now we are slowly arriving at the point where programming starts being fun. The last part was about bringing color-effects onto the screen by copying a color-table into the color-ram, moving this chart to the next position, inserting the color, that comes out at one end, at the other end and finally copying our new color-table into the color-ram again. So we had a closed loop. Now we want to see the whole thing in a reasonable, regular speed and... well, we want to show off a bit and to bring this effect into the background of a Basic-program. Hold it, hoolllld it!! Yo...

by Wanja Gayk Hi guys! The programs we've written so far aren't really all too useful, wouldn't you admit? But now we're going to try some cooler stuff. Today I want to show you how to produce a nice color effect on the screen ... Interested? Okay, start your monitors and let's get going! For starters we're going to let the first line of the screen change color. To be able to do that it's necessary to know how the C64 handles colors. This is how it works in the text mode: if you look at the screen memory you'll notice that the screen code for the character from the upper-left corner can be found in $0400 .....

by Wanja Gayk Hi everyone! I hope you got along well with the first part and that you still want to go on. This time we're going to really start off. So get your monitors warmed up! Let's recall the program from last course in which we switched the color of frames and the background from black to white and back again. It looked like this (you had to start it with SYS 8192 from BASIC or G 2000 from your ML monitor): .A2000 LDA #$00 ; value of black into the accumulator, .A2002 STA $D020 ; loads value of accumulator into register for frame colors, .A2005 STA $D021 ; loads value of accumulator into register for background colors, .A2...

by Wanja Gayk translated by Kendra Thiemann revised by Nate Dannenberg Assembly. Machine Language. For many people these are still riddles without solutions. But many experienced programers swear that Assembler is THE language to use, not to mention being easier and more flexible than Basic. But why? Well, first of all Assembler-instructions are very small and don't actually do much by themselves. However, their combined effect can be quite impressive. To understand these instructions, we first have to learn to count in binary and hexadecimal, since most operations are easier to understand when expressed in this form. BITS AND BYTES F...