Survey posted 2005-01-31 22:40 by Jon.

Contribute ideas to surveys by sending a mail to survey@ticalc.org.

Please see the URL I have posted if you don't know what I'm talking about, also found at http://www.ticalc.org/community/articles

Append: This idea was subliminaly inspired by Morgan Davies :P

You know I actually wasn't sure when I was talking on AIM, however I did find that email, check subject "article submisions" in the folder :-) I'm counting this as three in a row!! :-)

I hope it does come back! I have a couple ideas myself! It would also be cool to be able to reply to them as the older ones were capable of. The newsest one was actually in the very first newsletter Joey produced. I thought it good enough to go up in there as well!

I'm all for articles, but the quality of a lot of those articles is lacking. Any future article should be more significant than "I wish someone else would make software x".

I'm not a big fan of opinionated articles. I'd prefer just the facts. Ie: Featured Program: "Wow! It's greyscale!"
Generally I just read the title and skim through to see if there are any hyperlinks.

The articles are a great idea, but people have just started forgetting about them. I the articles were easily found (a link on the homepage would do the trick), there would be WAY more contributions.

I was just thinking about submitting an article the other day on my(or whoever wants to take credit for it) idea for a 3rd-party TI-OS that mimicks TI's OS but optimizes better and stuff like that. I didn't really go and look for anyway to submit one, but I sure would like to and would encourage the staff to keep the feature.

ALERT!!!!!!!!
Hi I'm a basic programmer with little knowledge in assembly I have done some sophisticated games for the computer in basic but am looking to learn assembly for the 84+. I have a hearts game planned out with AI but it runs way to slow in basic and also have the entire planning for and RPG based off Runescape. I am looking for a person to teach me assembly so I can create these awesome games. Note: I have a Mac OS 9.7 which has kept me from using TASM so I need someone who can provide me with Mac based software also.

ASM is really tough stuff. I don't know of any utilities for a Mac, though I would first read through a tutorial so that you know what your getting into. I abandoned it and turned to C, personaly. I'm sure you can do it, but you've been warned.

He's right. ASM is not for the faint of heart. Think of it like this: it's one step above typing in binary (my Dad has fond memories of that!). C's probably your best bet.

offtopic

My Grandfather actually met the guy that made C. He used to work at IBM

Anykey's right, it is literally just one step above binary. It's just slightly easier to read and understand. Learning ASM is rough, but I think anybody can do it, given enough effort and persistence. If you do take the time to learn it, I think it will be worth it. Even though I never really did anything with it, the logic behind ASM helped me in other areas (especially planning routines in other languages) and it even subtly taught me a lot about how the functions of the calculator work "behind the scenes."

You just have to remember that it is a hard language. I guarantee you won't be able to learn it in just a week (like I did with QB :-P). I actually started attempting to learn z80 when I was 12. I got the basic concepts, but it didn't quite click. Like, I was able to make a few basic programs like TRON with a high score table and some other stuff that I didn't upload (thank God), but there were pieces missing from my understanding of how it all worked together. I eventually forgot about it, and a year later, I was bored... looking through the source code to some ASM games when it finally clicked. Now, I know I could make something worthwhile in ASM if I was motivated to do so, but I'm not. It's just that languages like these take a long time to learn and if you were younger and less experienced with programming (like I was, at the time), it's even harder. I recommend knowing a few other languages before going into ASM. C is nice (if you have a 68k).

So... yeah. I think it's great that you want to learn ASM, and I encourage you to do so, but I'm just warning you, it's not easy at all.

</ramble>

I think that if you want to learn ASM, you might as well just type in binary. It couldn't be that much harder, and it would be so cool to be able to write a game with entirely 1s and 0s.

>>It's just slightly easier to read and understand

Slightly? It is infinitely easier to read and understand

Not if you read binary, like the people in The Matrix do.

I say "slightly" because ASM is hard enough to understand as it is and when it comes down to it, it doesn't get much harder than that. Learning the syntax of ASM in my opinion is more difficult than learning quick mental conversions of say, C9 to RET.

Not at all! Remembering the assembly syntax is easier because it's logical, if you think about it the right way. "ld a,32" obviously loads register a with the number 32, but "5E 20" has no logic to it, and therefore is much harder to remember.

Upgrade to MacOS X. That's your best bet. Then you can get TIGCC (although it's not entirely applicable for your situation) and a host of other programs. You might even be able to find the source for a TASM-like program and recompile it usign XCode.

In any course, get OS X. I do, however, suggest you wait for Tiger (OS X 10.4), as that would prevent you from being behind the curve in several months.

Yeah, TIGCC won't do you much good for the 84+. There are some fairly good free Z80 assemblers, though, and they ought to compile on OS X. TiLP is available for OS X; bin2var or similar shouldn't give you any trouble; TilEm ought to work (*crosses virtual fingers*) if you can get GTK installed properly.

In fact, just about everything in the Unix directory ought to work on OS X, though you may have to install other stuff such as GTK and fink.

Yeah, that is right, I voted the last choice, because I forgot all about them. Just because this is a reminder, does not mean that I should vote another choice.

I enjoy reading anything new or interesting in the TI community, regardless if it relates to me or not. News articles are great, and I would love to see more of them. This does increase the work on the news editor, but I think it's a good idea in general. However, the news here is pretty good by itself. But more long articles would be awesome. Great poll idea!