I'm going to take a long, extended break from the ASM tutorials. My goal is to make the lessons easy for the non-ASM programmer to understand, and so far, I have no idea if it's working past lesson 12. I'm a person who needs these files reviewed by new ASM programmers--feedback from regular, skilled ASM programmers will not help me know how well I'm doing. Furthermore, I can't attach files to posts on Cemetech, and for clear, understandable reasons, regular programmers just don't have time to read through them, which isn't their fault.

So I'm going to wait until people new to ASM have had a chance to read them and provide feedback, especially for lesson 17. It's nobody's fault at all, but I don't want to think I'm doing splendidly and end up with lesson 25 as a nightmare for the beginning programmer
I would hope that if a beginner programmer is being a good programmer and trying out examples and playing around with code as he or she goes through the lessons, that by lesson 25 he or she would no longer be a beginner programmer. Smile What's in Lesson 17 especially that you think would be challenging to a beginner?
KermMartian wrote:
What's in Lesson 17 especially that you think would be challenging to a beginner?


Sprites.

I agree with you, but I'm not comfortable without feedback.
Hot_Dog wrote:
KermMartian wrote:
What's in Lesson 17 especially that you think would be challenging to a beginner?


Sprites.

I agree with you, but I'm not comfortable without feedback.
That's fair and understandable. ASM coders like myself could try to think down to the level of someone seeing the language for the first time, but that definitely wouldn't be accurate enough (or indeed at all, probably). What method of spriting do you introduce? If you just give people existing routines to call, that's trivial. If you attempt to explain the sprite drawing code, aligned and unaligned, that's still not too hard. I think it was in my fourth or fifth week of coding TI-83 (not plus) ASM that I sat down with the source code of Movax's Sprite Routine, studied it for about an hour before I understood some of the more complex stuff about it, then create a 16x16 version of it.
Hot_Dog appears to have tried to remove the first post in this and others of his project threads here; I am trying to ascertain whether he was forced to do this by a third party or if it was of his own volition.
My goal in writing my Z80 lessons was to help people reach the point where they could read lessons such as 28 days without having any issues. Now it seems I reached my goal eariler than I expected. I've heard a lot of good things about my lessons, but apparently, people who read the lessons at this stage know enough to understand other ASM topics. And that's a good thing.

But now, it seems like all I'm doing is repeating 28 days, even if more in-depth. That was fine beforehand, because I though people would need deep explination of some of the topics in the lesson. But since people can read these without any trouble after the so-far-written ASM lessons of mine, there's no sense in repeating those topics.

I'm cutting out lessons 6, 11, and 15, leaving 11 lessons already written (stopping at displaying pictures). Lesson 12 will contain shavings of lessons 13, 15 and 17. Lesson 13 will be about floating point numbers/Index Registers, and Lesson 14 will wrap up the series. Lesson 14 will give the player the next steps, final information (including terms that ASM 28 doesn't define clearly), talk about 28 days and one other ASM tutorial I found useful, and encourage people to visit sites for ASM questions.

Appendixes I will also include:
--------------------------------

A. Designing flash applications with SPASM
B. Sprite routines. Rather than go into the technical details like lesson 17, I'll just tell people the basics behind sprites and transparency, and then give them some routines
C. The Key Routine Ztrumpet was looking forward to (known to ASM programmers as using the keyboard port)
D. Interrupts. 28 Days is not clear enough on this, and most of the example programs I've seen on other ASM lessons are not very helpful
E. Tables/References
That's sounds like a good plan, Hot Dog; I respect your decision to try to offer something different than ASM in 28 Days rather than supplant it, since that was indeed your original goal. I especially think that the Interrupts appendix will be helpful for everyone; it's only recently that I fully understood them.
[offtopic]Recently? Wow, so you didn't need interrupts for DCS?[/offtopic]

And thanks, Kerm, I've recieved positive reinforcements for my decision, including yours, so that makes me all the more excited to have it completely finished before this year is over.

Oh, and I will put a release on the downloads section of this site
Hot_Dog wrote:
[offtopic]Recently? Wow, so you didn't need interrupts for DCS?[/offtopic]

And thanks, Kerm, I've recieved positive reinforcements for my decision, including yours, so that makes me all the more excited to have it completely finished before this year is over
Well, it was a diminishing returns type of thing; I understood 90% of the material in 10% of my learning time, within my first year or two of ASM work, but there's a bunch of gotchas with port values that I recently ran into while working on CALCnet stuff that I wouldn't have discovered with a less-complex interrupt but which is still important.
  
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