I became convinced of the need for a modernized version of 83pa28d (the canonical introduction to programming Z80 assembly for the 83+ and similar machines) some months ago, but never achieved the motivation to do anything about it. Dapianokid's thread today revived that idea, so I jumped on the idea and started rewriting parts of it.

Long story short, I doubt I have enough motivation to make all the useful changes myself, so I'd love to get some other people helping here. I've created a repository tracking my changes, and there's a live copy on my web site. Anybody interested in doing some work on it, just post here or shoot me a message somewhere (PM, via IRC, whatever) with either your email address or bitbucket username, and I'll grant you commit access.

What I want to do:

• Stop supporting TASM and provide toolchain setup help for OSes other than Windows.
  
• Fix the wrong information in the interrupt section.
  
• Do something about day 14, because it seems weird to me.
  
• Discuss shells in some fashion.
  
• Interfacing with the outside world via the link ports?
  
• Whatever else occurs to me while reading through

What I've done thus far:

• Created a skeleton of improvements to day 1

Discuss! I'm sure other people have opinions on what's wrong with 83pa28d, so I want to hear them.

I heartily support fixing the interrupt section, with which I'd be happy to help. I'm super-biased, but since the DCS SDK is designed to be cross-platform, I'd vote that setting that up (including mono/python when needed) would be a good replacement. Have you tried contacting the original author to see if he'd like to help?

I'd say that brass and/or spasm would be good choices but I think that using the DCS SDK itself would be rather baised and in poor taste for a generic tutorial such as 83pa28d. Spasm having native versions for all OS's and using syntax basically identical to tasm are large pluses for it as well. That said if we use Brass it then becomes the question of Brass or Brass3, though I know the DCS SDK uses the original brass it may be worth hearing the authors, aka benryves, input on that one.

My choice of Brass mainly stems from that the same binary can be made to run on any system. I also considered mentioning other toolchains (SPASM, ZDS, whatever else), so don't think I was going to totally disregard those other tools.

I'm not really aware of major differences between Brass and Brass3, so I was assuming Brass3 would be the one to go with. Perhaps we can get Ben in here to offer an opinion.

I believe Ben feels that the Brass 1.x code is a huge mess, but that the program is more complete than Brass 3.

Brass 3 is more complete, if anything, but Brass 1 is more self-contained and (mostly) works as a drop-in replacement for TASM so is probably the safer bet.

When you do get round to the continual improvement of the tutorial, might I recommend that you add quizzes at the end of each day so that the reader can test their understanding of the concepts taught? I think this would be really worthwhile for the learning experience.

You managed to find this thread! It actually has been supplanted by this newer thread; would you mind cross-posting your suggestion there?

http://www.cemetech.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9275

Sorry Kerm. It was the newer thread that I was unable to find!
I will cross-post now!