So far I haven't gotten any reviews from people who have never done ASM before.  Although what the lesson teaches is important, that's not my biggest concern.  My biggest concern is if the lesson is understandable or not.

I think every programmer at one time or another should write a call stack with frame pointer, a dynamic memory manager and some simple programs just to understand the costs of the operations you do all the time.

Please, don't scare away the customers I'm trying to attract! 

Quote from: Hot_Dog on April 25, 2010, 12:20:36 am

Quote from: Quigibo on April 25, 2010, 12:13:47 am

I think the hardest part of learning asm is the shift in paradigm.  In my opinion, someone with very little programming background will be able to learn the language and understand it better initially than someone who has exclusively programmed in higher level languages their whole lives.  I remember the concept of flags, registers, unsigned arithmetic, bit shifting, etc.  seemed so foreign to me when I was first learning.  You never cover that stuff in high level.  In my head I kept trying to make my code look and feel like the languages I was used to so then it would all be simple and I could just naturally pick it up.  But you can't do that, its impossible.  You miss all the concepts that are absolutely essential to do all the low level tasks which is the whole point.

You have to start with a very open mind.  Your knowledge of how to ride a bike isn't going to help you much when you're trying to fly a helicopter.  It took me about a whole summer to get the hang of it and it was almost a year before I could write a game with it.

Can you explain that?  Are you saying I should not talk to people with the idea of Ti-Basic, assuming that they know that language?  Otherwise, what do you mean?

Yeah its just a general suggestion I'm making.  It wasn't in response to the lesson you posted, I haven't read it yet, I was just giving my personal experience.

Thanks for explaining!  Now that I understand, I appreciate the suggestion.

I think the hardest part of learning asm is the shift in paradigm.  In my opinion, someone with very little programming background will be able to learn the language and understand it better initially than someone who has exclusively programmed in higher level languages their whole lives.  I remember the concept of flags, registers, unsigned arithmetic, bit shifting, etc.  seemed so foreign to me when I was first learning.  You never cover that stuff in high level.  In my head I kept trying to make my code look and feel like the languages I was used to so then it would all be simple and I could just naturally pick it up.  But you can't do that, its impossible.  You miss all the concepts that are absolutely essential to do all the low level tasks which is the whole point.

You have to start with a very open mind.  Your knowledge of how to ride a bike isn't going to help you much when you're trying to fly a helicopter.  It took me about a whole summer to get the hang of it and it was almost a year before I could write a game with it.

Can you explain that?  Are you saying I should not talk to people with the idea of Ti-Basic, assuming that they know that language?  Otherwise, what do you mean?

I wonder if the guy who made the program that checks if your calc has the extra RAM could let you use the code to detect this extra RAM so your game store the info in an alternative way when ran on a calc lacking the extra RAM? I forgot who it is but the program was located in a topic named "Extra RAM pages trouble" on UTI forums.

Ah, okay...I'll look into that sometime

wow awesome! I like the part where you see the building info at the bottom. Question, is building time/delay gonna be implemented soon? (for example if it takes a few seconds to build a factory)

Also I don't mind the space it takes, even if it takes 10 pages of app and all RAM (unless it's like Gemini where you need to delete everything else from archive to clear the VAT )

Yes, we'll have building delay for construction...and you will be able to see the building progress when you highlight it.  It won't be a bar, but you will see the HP increasing little by little. 

In this case, when a building is constructing, the graphic will appear as a foundation with a wrench on it.  Since we need to conserve space, we're not going to be able to do what Starcraft does and display parts of the building that have been made.

As for RAM, we're going to make the amount reasonable so users don't have to worry about the VAT.  Plus, we're going to make a version where ti-84+ users (or Ti-83+ silver edition users) will have the data stored in the extra 96 KB ram.  The reason we're using so much ram is for processing power...in the case of a multi-page application, it's faster to access data from ram than it is to access data from another page.

Yes, it's z80, but once you get the basic idea behind ASM in general, it doesn't take months to transfer from one form of asm to another.  It's the basics that people have a hard time with.