That includes aligning and clipping in every direction which sometimes is not used in regular assembly when you don't need those and I have a feeling a lot of that time actually went into the for loop I was using since it took almost a second even with nothing in the loop.

It depends on what you're trying to do.  Somethings take almost the same amount of time like "Disp", "Output", and "ClrDraw" for instance because they are basically the same routines.  The only speed increase there is the absence of the interpreter.

Other things like storing to variables, math, and reading from lists are hundreds of times faster than BASIC becasue you are dealing with 16-bit integers instead of 72-bit floats.  Native assembly is even faster still because you can use registers for temporary storage and decide when you need the faster 8-bit operations instead of the 16-bit ones, but the difference is only 1.5 to 2 times the speed generally.

The rest of the commands like sprite drawing, grayscale, copying data, etc. are pretty much the exact same speed as regular assembly because its literally replacing those with the same routines you would use if you were programming in regular assembly except I've spent the time to optimize them to be as fast as possible.

I can't really compare Axe to BASIC much more than the math commands becasue things like sprite drawing don't exist in BASIC.  Pixel drawing is the same speed in BASIC and in Axe if you're updating the screen after every pixel.  But if you draw all the pixels first and then update the screen when you're done, you can fill the entire screen in about half a second since updating the LCD is so slow.  The best way to see "how fast it is" is to just try running some programs like "How long does it take to draw 10,000 sprites?"  (about 3 seconds)  "How long does it take to do 10,000 multiplications?" (about 2 seconds) etc.

And just to add a clarification: While I do encourage open-source, if you want your source code to remain private for any reason, please indicate that in the submission email.  You still have to submit the source code to the judges to make sure there was no asm usage or other violations of the rules, but only the executable will be made public with your entry.

I will definitely have a new example program in the next version.  And it will be an entire game, not just a demo like the other ones.

Oh yeah, that WAVE support... I did try, but the quality was unacceptably low in 6MHz with any kind of compression.  It was something I wanted to add at one time, but after playing around with it, it doesn't seem practical.  Someone can always write an Axiom for it eventually but I don't think it will be supported natively.

The largest semantic obstacle when learning axe is Pointers.  If you've never programed in a language that uses pointers before, you might have a hard time getting used to it.  The Wikipedia article about them is good, but its pretty technical and most of the examples are with C syntax.  The second important thing to be aware of is the difference between signed and unsigned numbers,  operations, and what you can actually store in the built in variables which are 16-bit integers instead of floats.  Once you get past those 2 things, you'll start having a lot of fun because you get a lot of power, some times too much when it causes ram clears or freezes, so be sure to use it responsibly and archive/backup anything important.

You can start on a big project if you want, but you'll want to have every important function as a subroutine so that you can work on the project step by step.  For instance, first write a routine "Draw Tile" that draws a tile and run the program to test it out.  Then, try to make a new routine "Draw Map" which calls the tile drawing routine to draw your tiles according to an array.  Then "Scroll Map" which scrolls the tile map, etc.  So as long as you keep working on smaller sections of code at a time, you might be able to manage a somewhat large project at the same time as you learn the language.  Good luck on your project!

Probability of having a 2nd page of data is about 80% right now.  It's more difficult to find some allocated space for 2 pages and I also have several ideas of how I could implement it that I need to decide on.  Its also on the dangerous side, so I need to make sure I do a lot of debugging before I actually release it.  I think with all the things I still want to add, there might actually be more versions before 1.0 or several versions after 1.0 for followup.

Yeah I should turn ADP off, I completely forgot about that.  As for that app error, that's really strange because that error code doesn't exist.  If you can replicate it, can you email me the source or upload it if its not for the contest?  Thanks.