Wir wollen auch toller Typen sein, so we made a rotzoomer - fullscreen,
realtime and each frame... .. Congratulations! You found the hidden part in
Kick Assembler. It's easter so Drax played the fiddle, Vic waved the paint
brush and Slammer solved some formulas and wrote this text. Additional graphics
was taken from spritepad... .. At least this was how I planned to start this
text, but this production was delayed and spring turned into summer. I just
came home from an open air concert with the funky guys in Tower of Power, the
band that many thinks one of our previous demos was named after. The band has
existed for 39 years and these old dudes can still play. Stephan 'The funky
doctor' Kupka, a guy, who I will guess to be in his sixties, still joyfully
played his baritone sax and rocked to the rhythm in spite of his beer belly and
old age. Yeah! That's the way to do it.. If we can still code, or do what ever
we do in the same spirit when we are sixty, then we have managed our lives the
right way, and I still get a kick out of programming on this old machine, how
about you guys? ... .. I just tested this demo in Hoxs64 and found that this
emulator synchs the sound and effects, so if you use Hoxs64 don't press 'E' in
the intro. Greetings to all who gave feedback on Kick Assembler and helped
improve it. I guess one of the features I use the most is the pseudo commands
which are a direct consequence of some posts in the Kick Assembler thread in
the coders forum on CSDB... Btw. Try to find the hidden effect in this hidden
demo, it's a little homage ;-) A big thanks to Drax for delivering the music so
fast. The demo wasn't finished at Easter, but instead I used the music as a
skeleton for the timing so it was really nice to have it so soon... .. And now
to something completely different. Michael Rasmussen was forced out of Tour de
France this year while holding the yellow jersey. Instead Contador won the
Tour, a rider who was associated with last year's big doping scandal. It's
seems like cycling has become more a matter of politics than on who is fastest.
Not that I thinks Rasmussen is not doped. I guess they all are, at least all
the riders in top 20. If doping didn't involve health risks for the riders, you
could do like they do in Formula One - have a driver's championship and a
constructor's championship. In cycling it would be a rider's championship and a
medical championship. Perhaps they already have it? Who is best, the riders
doped by Francesco Conconi or Eufemiano Fuentes? Well, who knows, but now you
will have to excuse me because I have to get a cola. It will make me fat but
keep me up all night so I can finish this demo. Who are the best coders - those
on Coca Cola or those on Pepsi? ... .. . This part was the one that got this
little Easter egg started. It's kind of a retro part which i just felt like
doing one day I was watching Mixer from Upfront and Stargates multiple
scrollers on top of each other. So I started programming and came up with this
in a couple of hours - the rest took a bit longer. But why code in the c64 in
2007? Many people say they wanna go back to the roots, but for me this was more
like a brand new challenge. Back in the old days my focus weren't on the
structure of the code, but more on the effect and the final result. Now 14
years, alot of high level programming and a masterdegree in computer science
later my focus is atleast as much on coding style and making code flexible and
reusable. With experience, this comes natural in languages like C++, Java, C#
etc, but in 6510 assembler you don't have the same language constructs and
performance is often a major factor which makes it more difficult. Now, after
making Kick Assembler I started playing around with it's features to see how
they could help ease the task of coding and try to find new usefull programming
patterns. Sometimes very simple things really make a difference, eg. normally
in the old days I would always write something like lda #$18, sta $d018 to set
up the charset and the screen. However, defining a function that calculates the
$d018 value from the actual address is much more flexible and makes relocating
the memory much easier. So lda #toD018(screen, charset), sta $d018 is much more
flexible. I also found that writing a library of 8, 16 and 24 bit pseudo
commands is very usefull. Only using a single mov16 command to set you irq
adress or a single lsr24 bit command to shift 3 bytes is really handy. Ordenary
macros don't take into account that they can be called with different types of
assembler arguments (immidiate, absolute, etc.) but pseudocommands does, which
makes them more fit for building libraries. They are also quite usefull to
structure your program where you in high level languages would use a
subroutine. All this is new land to conquer and that's what makes it fun... ..
Still lots of memory to fill with text, but the time is running out. This
version of Kick Assembler is scheduled to be released this weekend and it's
time to crunch so these 5123 bytes will be the words of today.. See you later..
..... ..... .....
