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From: bryce@hoser.berkeley.edu.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Amiga Manuals
Message-ID: <3998@zen.berkeley.edu>
Date: Sun, 27-Sep-87 05:53:01 EDT
Article-I.D.: zen.3998
Posted: Sun Sep 27 05:53:01 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 27-Sep-87 22:55:15 EDT
References: <1766@crash.CTS.COM>
Sender: news@zen.berkeley.edu
Reply-To: bryce@hoser.berkeley.edu.UUCP (Bryce Nesbitt)
Organization: Center Tapped Solids, Inc.
Lines: 37

In article <1766@crash.CTS.COM> amiguy@pnet01.CTS.COM (Sean Wolfe) writes:
>
>[If you think the A1000 manuals are bad...]
>And theres the story about the C64 programmers
>reference guide on the subject of smooth scrolling. You look in the index for
>smooth scrolling (which was a big deal in the old 64 days) and go to the
>specified page.  It tell's you that you have to write a machine lang. routine
>to do smooth scrolling, that's it. It doesn't give any information on how to
>do it. That's probably because Commodore didn't know either.

Don't know what your complaint is.  I found the C64 Programmer's
Reference Guide to be an excellent guide.  Clearly written and well
partitioned.  All the information needed, rolled into one little
package.  I checked and the smooth scrolling description was complete
(except for the sprites in the border trick :-).

Because of the nature of the C64, machine language is often needed.
BASIC 2.0 does not support any graphics primitives more complex
than "print".  For a long time *after* those manuals came out the only two
languages for the C64 were BASIC and 6502.

Very few errors or ommisions.  (With the definite exception of the serial
bus timing charts and some related serial bus warnings (ie. sprites
enabled during disk access))

The authors were not attributed, are to be complimented.

Like the A1000 tech manuals, they are *not* tutorial.  That is best left
to another book.  The Programmer's Reference Guide seemed to try hard to
give BASIC examples for everything, but at certain points that
become impractiable.

 
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