Ok, here's mine - for a real micro :) http://www.worldofspectrum.org/stk/ http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0012128
Can't remember significant POKE'ing trivia, but can still write Z80 Assembly to save my life, after almost 20 years... will probably not remember only rarely-used instructions, including most undocumented ones (Z80 had a ton of these). In the good times I'd write simple routines in straight hexadecimal. It's amazing how well your memory works when you don't have an IDE with auto-completion - or at least I (we?) like to think that, because the alternative conclusion is that my brain was better as a teen :) Now in the "it's never too late to learn" category, just a few months ago I found some retro page explaining the fastest possible method for copying blocks of memory with the Z80 - a critical operation for games using double-buffering. I already knew that looping instructions like LDIR/LDDR were slow and used simple unrolling; but there's an even faster method, using the stack pointer to alternatively index the source and destination blocks, loading as much data as possible into all other registers (including the alternate ones) with POP instructions, then writing with PUSH's, loop till end... this flies because the 16-bit PUSH/POP instructions are 2X faster than equivalent 16-bit LD's (probably true for other 8-bit CPUs too), plus you get the src/dest address incs/decs for free. Only trick is disabling interrupts because we are messing with SP. And of course, since PUSH and POP update SP in inverse directions, your back-buffer must be all upside-down so the block-copy routine doesn't need extra logic to compensate for that. (Now let me return to my day job, i.e. >10-Mb footprint for HelloWorld in any modern lang) On Oct 19, 10:57 am, Christian Catchpole <[email protected]> wrote: > screen colour = black > border colour = black > cursor colour = white > > (and i remembered that from 1987) > > http://twitpic.com/2yzlcp -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
