TL;DR : An Axe command list with size, speed, and notes for Axe commands. Good for optimizing.

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I'd say I'm fairly decent at optimizing Axe programs. This stems partially from my good amount of experience with Axe. After having used Axe for a long time, I know all of the commands and options available, so when trying to make code to do something, I can usually think of many different ways to do it. Knowing offhand the sizes of a decent number of commands helps me eliminate a large number of these options, and between what's left, I often just try each option one by one, compiling the program with each option and seeing which is the smallest.

What helps even more to optimize my code is my experience with z80 assembly. When thinking about the smallest or fastest way to do something, I could think of the assembly code that Axe commands break down into and actually count bytes and cycles for a very exact comparison.

The Auto Opts.txt file included in Axe releases helped me learn a lot, but it only lists the sizes of what its name would suggest, the automatic optimizations. And although those often help to produce the smallest sizes, what about speed? And what about commands that aren't listed there? I often had to resort to methods like I talked about above, such as brute force testing all the options or trying to step through the assembly in my head. But those can be difficult and time consuming, even for someone with a lot of experience.

So I decided to make a list, detailing some specifications about every Axe command. This means basic loading and saving, auto optimizations, math routines, graphic routines, everything. For every command, I listed the command's size and equivalent Axe code. With this file, you could determine the exact size of anything you can do in Axe. It also lists the exact or approximate time that most commands take, so you can optimize for speed as well, something which is much harder to determine than size without examining the underlying machine code for every command. But I did just this, so others who are able to don't have to spend the lengthy amount of time doing so, and so others who aren't able to don't have to be able to.

I am missing the speed of some commands, as the remaining ones are some of the more challenging ones to test. I hope to test all of these eventually, but for now I'll release what I have. But for the commands that do have speed documented, you can learn some interesting things. Like how Pt-Off() is faster than Pt-On() and Pt-Change() for drawing aligned sprites (x and y are multiples of 8), but slower for unaligned sprites. Or how, on my calculator's hardware at least, DispGraph^r is actually faster than DispGraph.


Anyways, without further ado, I'll attach the file. I highly suggest viewing it in a text editor like Notepad. Without a monospaced font and an 8-character tab width, it won't look pretty. I'll try to keep it up to date and modify it as new versions of Axe come out so you can always have a copy you can know is accurate for the current version.


Tip: To search for a specific command, try using your text file viewer's find feature to search for the Axe source code equivalent.

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If you see any errors or have any questions or suggestions, just post them here.

Current version: 0.5.3b

Erm, I tried opening it in notepad, and I got normal text interspaced with a bunch of garbage/chinese characters.
Is there a particular encoding I should use?

How to open this? xD Nice job Runer.

Very nice!  None of my text editors can read the file properly but I can still kind of see some of it.  This would definitely be better in the documentation than the AutoOps file.  It seems difficult to maintain and keep updated though since the commands change so often.

The new version works fine in Notepad and Opera. I haven't tried in other softwares, though. Very nice Runer112, it should be useful for in-depth optimizations

I think it should be included with Axe.

why isn't this stickied?

Good question, why isn't it?

why isn't this stickied?

I totally agree.

Also Runer, I was wondering, can I make a html version of it?

Since I have quite a few calculator programming databases in my website (Bcalls, hex instructions and prizm equates), could I host it at my website?