Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!usc!rutgers!cbmvax!jesup
From: jesup@cbmvax.commodore.com (Randell Jesup)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: More assembly questions
Keywords: Abacus Book
Message-ID: <11891@cbmvax.commodore.com>
Date: 29 May 90 06:31:01 GMT
References: <1990May17.072036.11335@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu> <23257@uflorida.cis.uf <265377fd-662.2comp.sys.amiga.tech-1@tronsbox.UUCP> <9074@rouge.usl.edu>
Reply-To: jesup@cbmvax (Randell Jesup)
Organization: Commodore, West Chester, PA
Lines: 34

In article <9074@rouge.usl.edu> wakres01@pa.usl.edu (1712 Stelly John B) writes:
>In article <265377fd-662.2comp.sys.amiga.tech-1@tronsbox.UUCP> dfrancis@tronsbox.UUCP (Dennis Francis Heffernan) writes:
>>	I haven't found any good ones yet, either.  I'm new to this too
>>and the best info I've found has been in Abacus' AMIGA MACHINE LANGUAGE
>>(which at one point seems to advocate ignoring the rules and programming
>>the sound chips directly) and Jim Butterfield's articles in Trans-Ami
>
>I have the Abacus book, and don't find it to be particularly useful...
>I didn't appreciate the fact that most of the code in the book requires
>you to modify it (if you don't have assemPro, and I bought CAPE 68K), and
>there are no instructions for modifying the code for other assemblers,
>alothough they do mention the K-SEKA assembler briefly.

	As a personal opinion, I dislike most of the Abacus Amiga books.
They tend to encourage poor programming practices (like not using symbolic
constants, not using standard include files, making direct rom references,
making MAJOR assumptions about how system tasks work (assuming that clearing
a bit in some system task's structure will stop it from running), etc, etc.)
Note that is a personal opinion.

>to avoid figuring it out in assembly, there are really *NO* good references
>to interfacing your assembly programs with the Amiga's OS that I know of,
>which is sad because its keeping me from developing faster applications ( I 
>don't have the time or the will power to keep crashing the machine until
>something works !) 

	Just get a good book on general amiga programming.  That (and the
autodocs in the "Includes and Autodocs" RKM) will do you pretty well.  The
Autodocs define all the interfaces to the system routines.

-- 
Randell Jesup, Keeper of AmigaDos, Commodore Engineering.
{uunet|rutgers}!cbmvax!jesup, jesup@cbmvax.cbm.commodore.com  BIX: rjesup  
Common phrase heard at Amiga Devcon '89: "It's in there!"