@Vikke

Well I like to learn more assembler so can remove all that copper, paula stuff from the code, LOL

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PaintShop Pro is awesome for pixel graphics. I wish there was something similar for Amiga.
Dpaint, PPaint, Brilliance, etc. are nice enough, but lacking too much for my tastes. One very basic, but very handy feature I miss for example is the ability to have individual images, each with their own palette on the same screen.

Some people seem a bit offput by the default setting for PSP, thinking it to be a more humble photoshop type package, but that's simply not the case. It was never intended as an "image processing" type package (even if later versions did end up with some basic functionality in that regard). Set pen pixel size to 1, decrease color depth to 4 or 8 bit and away you go :)

Might take a day or two to get familiar with it, but once I did Ive struggled to find any amiga software that's as good.

Apart from that there's always grafx2, which isnt too bad, albiet with some of the same restrictions as Dpaint, etc. 4P is another, but that's even more basic and a bit unstable. Promotion is another that's not too bad. Deluxe Paint PC version isnt too bad either.

Whatever you decide though I wish you good luck.

Last edited by fishy_fis on 04-Mar-2013 at 08:12 PM.

@fishy_fis

Corel PaintShop Pro is a familiar program. I have been using it for educational purposes for about 10 years. I don't have an own license for it, but I can use it one one of my work laptops if it works well with pixelgraphics (I have never even tested it on the software).

Regarding laptops, I got yeasterday a batch of Acer W510 hybrid-tablets. Today I tested WinUAE on one of them, and it seems to work well, _if_ you have the keyboard connected. The tablet has a little bit of plastic feel to it, but otherwise quite nice, at least the 20 hours of batterylife is great.

@NutsAboutAmiga

That's one reason to learn assembler and stuff about the hardwareregisters on the Amiga :)

Without the copper, blitter, sprites and advanced playfields it wouldn't be any more un codng on the Amiga than any other PC. Nothing bad about that, but I personally like coding to be fun. It is just that with re-targettable graphics you can't really optimize the code in any other way than just on assembler level. And then having a lot of different processors just makes almost impossible to make the code in assembler. C-programming isn't really my thing, but of course I have done my share of C code - but nothing beats assembler, assembler is just fun :)

It is a shame that assebler isn't teached at university level anymore. It wasn't either when I studied (and that is already a long time ago), we had to use some kind of simple simulated assembler, it just sucked. I hated that, and at that point in time I really knew how to code both the MOS6502 and MC68000 in real assembler.

Why couldn't the old way of doing things come back? Gaming consoles are the only place left were the same hardware is in use for a longer time and thus making it possible to optimize both code and use of graphics chips. That was the reason why I was thrilled when the PS3 came out, but then Sony took away the possibility to code directly against the hardware on other operating systems than Sonys own... later on the took out the possibility of other OSes all together. I would have loved to code on the CELL, it would have been a challenge, just like coding on the Amiga was during the heydays.

And one more thing,

my son is now at the same age (16y) as I was when I started to code in assembler on the C64, and now he is at least to some degree interested in what I'm doing with my Amiga coding.
He likes to know how some things are done, and why some things are in the code, that isn't assembler, like series of hexacode (colorcodes) and long series of "stupid" numbers (read that as precalc sinustables etc).

Perhaps he will become the next Amiga coder? ;)

@Vikke

An amiga coding site is REALLY needed!
It's hard to find oldskool amiga demo coding info on the net!

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:)

I started to code a lil bit when frequenting ada site like 10 years ago, but abruptly stopped due RL etc.

I would defo follow a step by step "course" if you make a website!

I'll try to make up a plan for content regarding democoding for a website during the weekend. As well as set up a website for this.

@Vikke

Quote:

That's one reason to learn assembler and stuff about the hardwareregisters on the Amiga :)

It's just that disassembler does not know the different between machine code and text strings, thats cause big headaches, I guess better to just forget it, or ask for source code.

Quote:

Without the copper, blitter, sprites and advanced playfields it wouldn't be any more un codng on the Amiga than any other PC.

AmigaOS has different API then what Windows or Linux has so, so I guess it not the same, its fully accessable from assembly language.

Quote:

Nothing bad about that, but I personally like coding to be fun. It is just that with re-targettable graphics you can't really optimize the code in any other way than just on assembler level.

I guess is fun lean some thing about clock cycles an bits and bytes on chipsets, it should be perfectly possible to do that in C too, its not a assembler only thing, used to do some micro processor programing in C and assembler a long time ago. (68000, Z80, 6800, 6804, and some other processors I don't remember.)

Quote:

And then having a lot of different processors just makes almost impossible to make the code in assembler.

I'm not shore its true, dynamic recomplication is often used to optimize code before you execute the code.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_recompilation

dynamic recomplication is simular to JIT, but JIT is used more in emulators to convert code from one type of assembler to another, like MC680x0 to PowerPC, or MC680x0 to x86.

(JIT has do the dynamic recomplication during run time, thats probably not ideal.)

Quote:

C-programming isn't really my thing, but of course I have done my share of C code - but nothing beats assembler, assembler is just fun :)

Well you use right tool for the right job, assembler is good to reduce stack push's and pop's and to optimize, but its easier to make critical mistakes.

Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 06-Mar-2013 at 01:11 AM.

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@Vikke

Quote:

It is a shame that assembler isn't teached at university level anymore. It wasn't either when I studied (and that is already a long time ago), we had to use some kind of simple simulated assembler, it just sucked. I hated that, and at that point in time I really knew how to code both the MOS6502 and MC68000 in real assembler.

I be surprized if its not being teached anymore for technicians, whit in fields of electronics and computer science.

Quote:

Why couldn't the old way of doing things come back?

It never went away, you do assembler optimizing in drivers and video decoding and pleases where it can make a difference not in some code you only run once and never again.

Yes its a shame about PS3, and Sony not seeing the value of people trying to explore the hardware and what it can do.

Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 06-Mar-2013 at 01:13 AM.
Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 06-Mar-2013 at 12:10 AM.

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Quote:

Vikke wrote: @olegil And one question. Does new games for the A500 or A1200 still get published?

Frank Wille recently coded Sqrxz 1 & 2 in 68k assembler with his assembler vasm (used by vbbc compiler) banging the hardware old skool:

http://www.sqrxz.de/sqrxz-about/sqrxz-download/

It works on everything from an Amiga 1000 with 68000 and a floppy to a 4000T with 68060 and AmigaOS 3.9 from a hard drive! Here's Frank's web site and vasm page:

http://sun.hasenbraten.de/~frank/
http://sun.hasenbraten.de/vasm/

Vasm is the best optimizing assembler available for the 68k, it's cross platform and the source is available, it's free and it's well supported. Frank has quickly fixed many bugs I've reported. It is programmed in C so it is a little slow and big for the 500. It's mostly compatible with Devpac which has a nice development environment and is faster but not free. It's not too hard to find a copy floating around though. I use BDebug from the Barfly package for debugging:

http://aminet.net/dev/asm/BarflyDisk2_00.lha

Oh, and as somebody already mentioned, EAB is probably the place for demo coders and classic development questions:

http://eab.abime.net/

Quote:

NutsAboutAmiga wrote: It's just that disassembler does not know the different between machine code and text strings, thats cause big headaches, I guess better to just forget it, or ask for source code.

Disassemblers can do a pretty good job of determining what is a string. Small data can be difficult to judge whether it's code or data (strings) though. Here is a newer version of ADis that I have been working on:

http://www.heywheel.com/matthey/Amiga/ADis.lha

It still needs work but most OS friendly code can be disassembled and reassembled with vasm without making changes. It doesn't tell you the names of Amiga hardware registers like IRA does though. The source code is very readable if you want to make changes. I hope to find some time to fix some bugs after I finish the DosBox 68k dynamic recompiler support.

Quote:

dynamic recompilation is similar to JIT, but JIT is used more in emulators to convert code from one type of assembler to another, like MC680x0 to PowerPC, or MC680x0 to x86.

The 68k makes a good intermediary code as it's easy to emulate and has good code density. I wonder how close in speed a PPC optimized JIT/dynrec compiler converting optimized 68k code could come to the average compiled PPC code. I bet there wouldn't be too big of difference.

Last edited by matthey on 06-Mar-2013 at 06:21 PM.
Last edited by matthey on 06-Mar-2013 at 06:20 PM.
Last edited by matthey on 06-Mar-2013 at 04:10 AM.

@Vikke

A site like this one for Amiga would be great
http://codebase64.org/doku.php
Kamelito

@matthey

I'll try out Vasm at some point, sadly it doesn't run on Windows, but perhaps a A1200 in WinUAE will be fast enough?

@kamelit0

Yes, such a page would be nice to have regarding the Amiga. But it has to be teamwork to make a website with so much diversity in the code examples.

I will make something a little simpler in the beginning.

I have plans on making both code and executables freely available for testing, and I will also put videos regarding the effects on Youtube (for a fast and easy way to check out what the code produces).

I'm a little restraind regarding time at the moment, but the website with the first code should be up and running within a few days.

@Vikke

I had already created a forum for coding:
http://www.amigacoding.de/

If categories are needed I can add them

Or you need more?

Last edited by OlafS25 on 06-Mar-2013 at 06:19 PM.

@OlafS25

a forum that is completely impossible to register on for a mortal..

Quote:

Vikke wrote: @matthey I'll try out Vasm at some point, sadly it doesn't run on Windows, but perhaps a A1200 in WinUAE will be fast enough?

Your real Amiga 1200 with HD and extra memory should handle vasm until you are writing large programs. There is a big difference between an unexpanded 500 and a 1200 with fast memory and HD. Personally, I would choose the 1200 for programming as the 68020 and AGA are much nicer to develop for and you can program and test on the same machine. It's still pretty "restrictive" by today's standards. I still use my real 060 Amiga for all my development by the way but I wouldn't if it was an unexpanded 500. I have UAE on my laptop but Bill owns it and doesn't let me use it for several minutes at times while he thrashes my hard drive. It is fast when it's fast though. If you do the UAE thing you might look into this:

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=62945

@wawa

Quote:

wawa wrote: @OlafS25 a forum that is completely impossible to register on for a mortal..

What's the problem? A lot of ppl have registered there including multiple ppl who are posting in this thread.

What browser and OS are u using?

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@ChaosLord

mostly chrome atm. but ive tried multiple times, answered stupid riddles, tried to read some hieroglyphs to paste them into boxes, filled the form for a number of times till ive got really fed up with it.

Quote:

wawa wrote: @ChaosLord mostly chrome atm. but ive tried multiple times, answered stupid riddles, tried to read some hieroglyphs to paste them into boxes, filled the form for a number of times till ive got really fed up with it.

I hate the unreadable hieroglyphs some forums have too :(. I didn't have any trouble creating an account with FireFox though.