Okay I have a simple OR-sprite display routine (slightly modified version from the 28days one) and the iFastCopy routine in my code. Point is, as a first step towards a simple tilemapper, I want to repeat one simple sprite 12x horizontally (the sprite is 8x8) and 8x vertically. For one reason or the other I can't work it out. I have had several errors now including the feared MEMORY error...so yea...I was runnin on an emulator though. It's probably very easy for the more advanced asm coders out here but here we go:

Sprite: size;8x8 label;SpriteData
Sprite Routine: A-register = x-coord, E-register = y-coord, B-register = #rows (not in bytes) IX-register = label of the sprite (in this case, SpriteData)

My modifications to the Srpite routine are extremely slight and the routine works absolutely fine when just drawing one sprite, my problem lies more in making a proper loop that increments the A and B register respectfully with 8 each pass. Also I read something about drawing in colums being faster than in rows, can anyone confirm? Or should I take a completely different approach towards tilemapping than drawing sprites 1 by 1?

Thanks!

I just read this on BBC news, i thought it would be an interesting read. The article is by Stephen Tomkins. Here you go (i could not copy the images):



The Sinclair ZX81 was small, black with only 1K of memory, but 30 years ago it helped to spark a generation of programming wizards.

Packing a heady 1KB of RAM, you would have needed many, many thousands of them to run Word or iTunes, but the ZX81 changed everything.

It didn't do colour, it didn't do sound, it didn't sync with your trendy Swap Shop style telephone, it didn't even have an off switch. But it brought computers into the home, over a million of them, and created a generation of software developers.

Before, computers had been giant expensive machines used by corporations and scientists - today, they are tiny machines made by giant corporations, with the power to make the miraculous routine. But in the gap between the two stood the ZX81.

It wasn't a lot of good at saving your work - you had to record finished programming onto cassette tape and hope there was no tape warp. It wasn't even that good at keeping your work, at least if you had the 16K extension pack stuck precariously into the back.

One wobble and your day was wasted. But you didn't have to build it yourself, it looked reassuringly domestic, as if it would be happy sitting next to your stereo, and it sold in WH Smiths, for £69.95.

"It started off a proud tradition of teenage boys persuading their parents to buy them kit with the excuse that it was going to be educational," recalls Gordon Laing, editor of the late Personal Computer World and author of Digital Retro. "It was no use for school at all, but we persuaded our parents to do it, and then we just ended up playing games on them."

The ZX81 was a first taste of computing for many people who have made a career out of it. Richard Vanner, financial director of The Games Creators Ltd, is one.

"I was 14," he says, "and my brain was just ready to eat it up. There was this sense of 'Wow, where's this come from?' You couldn't imagine a computer in your own home.

The machine could get very hot, recalls Vanner.

"The flat keyboard was hot to type on. If you had an extension pack you had to hold it in place with Blu-Tack, because if it wobbled a bit you'd lose everything. You'd have to unplug the TV aerial, retune the TV, and then lie down on the floor to do a bit of coding. And then save it onto a tape and hope for the best.

"But because it was so addictive, you didn't mind all these issues."

Many a teenaged would-be programmer spent hours poring over screeds of code in magazines.


The thermal printer was loaded with a shiny toilet roll
"It would take hours and hours to type in, and if you made just one mistake - which might have been a typing error in the magazine - it didn't work," says Laing.

"Also there was the thermal printer for it, with shiny four-inch paper like till receipts, and as soon as you got your fingers on it you could wipe it off. One fan site described it as 'a rather evil sort of toilet roll'."

In fact, the very limitations of the ZX81 are what built a generation of British software makers. Offering the ultimate in user-frostiness, it forced kids to get to grips with its workings.

"I taught myself to program with the manual," says Vanner, "which was quite difficult. It was trial and error, but I got things working. Then magazines started to come out, and there we were, game-making with 1K."

That lack of memory, similarly, was a spur to creativity.

"Because you had to squeeze the most out of it," says Vanner, "it forced you to be inventive. Someone wrote a chess game. How do you do chess with 1024 bytes? Well the screen itself took up a certain amount of memory, so they loaded the graphics onto the screen from the tape. There was no programme for that, but people got round these things with tricks."

Some feel that the amount of memory on today's computers can make programmers lazy and profligate. Sir Clive Sinclair himself told the Guardian last year: "Our machines were lean and efficient. The sad thing is that today's computers totally abuse their memory - totally wasteful, you have to wait for the damn things to boot up, just appalling designs. Absolute mess! So dreadful it's heartbreaking."

The name combined the two most futuristic letters in the alphabet with a number that rooted it in the present day - though that doesn't seem to have been particularly deliberate. The designer Rick Dickinson says they named its predecessor, the previous year's ZX80, after its processor, the Zilog Z80, with an added X for "the mystery ingredient".

Dickinson visited Dixons to consider which existing products it should look like, he says. "But I don't know that I came up with any answers. Most of this stuff was just blundering through, and hitting on something that just seemed right.

"We wanted it to be small, black and elegantly sculpted. Beyond that the main thing was the cost, so the keyboard had just three parts compared to hundreds today. And some keys had six or even seven functions, so there was the graphics exercise of getting that amount of data onto the keypad.

But why it so captured the public imagination, Dickinson finds hard to say.

"They liked the design of it, and they liked the price, but beyond that you'd have to ask a psychologist. It created its own market.

"No-one knew they wanted a computer. It was just the right product, at the right time, at the right price."

OK, since I got alot of positive reactions on my brief (yes that was still brief) overview about NLP I decided it deserved a seperate topic. Plus, it was taking over in Sir's topic. So I have discussed quite a few things but I don't think I really did it properly, I just wrote whatever came to my mind so it was a bit chaotic. My sources are a book called "Persuasion" by...ehr I forgot, "Unlimited Power"  by Anthony Robbins and just alot of blogs and webpages that discuss several NLP techniques. To answer some questions, ok NLP might not be without its errors because not all human behaviour is predicatable. However ALOT of human behaviour is. NLP is based on decades of psychological research by scientific experts. These techniques Are Proven time and time again. A other misconception is that NLP is about maipulating people, nothing is further from the truth. It is about placing yourself in someone else's shoes, it is about changing your emotional state at an instant so that you can be at your best anytime, anywhere. It only requires commitment. I can hand you the keys but it's you that has to pass the door.

So let me invite you to join me. I'll be building in a very slow rate from bottom to top. I will give you some assignments, some homework if you will. Because like I said, you can only harvest with commitment. The seeds are only mental.

So my first assignment is. Be dirt-honest with yourself right now and try to look at your life so far. What were you greatest accomplishments? When did you feel let down or depressed? Just take your life and skim through the highlights and the 'low' lights. Then answer this question: Are you happy? Do you feel you are getting all the juice out of life?

I can not make any promises as to what results you will get but I can tell you what I will learn you if you stick with me.

Part I: You

• Changing your beliefs to your benefit. If you think you are of no use to others then I'll provide techniques to replace those negative and useless beliefs with resourceful ones.
• Ready? Aim. Fire. Setting goals, and actually achieve them!
• World model. Take a sincere look at your own perception of the world, you might even want to change it!
• States. Use the power of states to control your emotions completely this will make you far more powerful then you were when you felt it was outside of your control. Which it never is.

Part II: They

• Building rapport. Getting trust from others, building a gentle and subtle connection. Very beneficial if you want to build a relationship of any kind
• Setting anchors.
• A: Personal anchors, with personal anchors a simple touch can change your mood from depressed to elated.
• B: Internal anchors, let the stimuli that caused you to get depressed now trigger you to be happy.
• C: Perception anchors, how to make others believe you have certain qualities by anchoring yourself to those qualities.
• Cues.
• A: Eye cues, is  someone making something up or not?
• B: Body language cues, is one feeling nervous or confident?
• C: Verbal cues, does one agree or not? + the Awesome Power of Metaphors!

So that is what I will give you, that is all I currently have but I am sure that by the time I finish this I will have learned alot more myself already. I'll be releasing/typing my first lesson here as soon as possible.

~There is nothing but Metaphors

All the best,

Matthias1992[/list][/list]

Ok I just thought I made this topic to get back onto this project. We have decided the hardware components for the OTZ80 but ever since then I haven't noticed any progress...
The big question now is, where do we go from here? Of course we will need to build a hardware dummy of this but who is going to make it? When will it be done? If it all works then what is our next step? I think we are in need of some sort of overall plan...personally I think it is good to know who is gonna do what and when they'll be doing it. If I were to make a schedule from here on I'd say our next step is to make one dummy, in the process of making it much can be learned and once it is succesfully made still more improvements might be possible. Actually building something also keeps the project alive, now again I have no clue as to who is willing to do this...I am not going to be it, I'd prefer to take a siderole in the whole development and just help on any level I can...

So who is going to do it (if anybody)?

Ok so I thought about this for a couple of weeks, since I am doing so many projects at the same time but I just couldn't resist. Ever since I first played assassins creed I wanted to make a port to the calc, now with axe, this is possible. The only thing stopping me from doing this is that I have no sprites, 0. I tried making them myself but they suck and to be honest I don't have the patience for it. I plan to make this a sidescroller and I intend on using either 12x8 or 16x16 sprites, whatever is easier for the spriters...(assuming you are willing to make me those sprites, I'll give you a bag of peanuts hehe).

So I hereby politely aks for:

-Sprite of Altair standing straigth up facing right
-Walk cycle of altair
-Run cycle of altair
-"blending" stealth walk cycle of altair

there are quite a few more but this is a LOT to begin with already, that is, if somebody is ready willing and able to pick this up...
You will get credit in the game and my near eternal thanks (I will still die one day by the blade of an assassin)

many thanks in advance!

Ok so recently a friend of mine and I tried some multiplayer games for the TI84+ series, guess whata, out of 5 tried games 0 worked! This is why we came up with the idea for a small asm library that we could use to make our own bomberman two-calc multiplayer game. however I can't find any info about sending info from one calc to another via the miniusb.

I intend on having the following commands available:

SendMode (sets a calculator ready for sending stuff, it will pause the program until one (one exactly) request is completed)
Syntax: {3}
requests:

ReqReal Requests a real variable from the other calc, the other calc has to be in SendMode!
Syntax: {4,#} #= any number from 1 to 26, 1=A, 2=B...26=Z (theta not supported)

ReqStr Requests a string variable from the other calc, the other calc has to be in SendMode!
Syntax: {5,#} #= any number from 0 to 9, 0=Str0, 1=Str1...9=Str9

ReqMtrx Requests a matrix variable from the other calc, the other calc has to be in SendMode!
Syntax: {6,#} #= any number from 1 to 10, 1=A, 2=B...10=J

ReqBuf Requests the screen buffer (basically what is on the screen on the sending calc) from the sending calc and draws it onto the screen of the requesting calc, the other calc has to be in SendMode!
Syntax: {7}

So can anybody give me some pointers on this? so far I ahve only found guides on how to link between a calc and a PC but not between two calcs...

As I skimmed trhough some old topics here + my previous experience with some members I am getting the idea that some members are really going trough some heavy stuff in live. I have read about suicidal people, break-ups, other losses in the family etc. I want to offer help to those who still have problems or need a listening ear. I don't in anyway mean to be arrogant but from childhood on I have been asked many times to comfort others (or I did that from myself). Therefore I think I am able to help some people out, give some advice or just to listen. just being heard can be a terrific relief.

Since there are also people on these forums whom are uncertain about their social skills or who are shy, I think I can help. of course I can only do this much but the main reason I can help is because I have been shy, I have been a outstander, shortly said I know what it is like to be in those situations. Altough to you I am much of a stranger sometimes strangers can listen better and feel better what the real problem is and how to solve it.

Now I can very well anticipate that some if not most of you are a little anxious about sending me or telling me anything, well that is the first step to solve a problem, share it even if I wouldn't reply to it (which I won't (in other words I will reply)) it's still a relief to have it said. I can understand if you don't trust me so if you are anxious to leave a reply below you could send a PM. I promise I won't share any information unless explicitly allowed.

My apologies for just coming up with this topic but truth be said, I do think some people here need help and want help furthermore, I think I can provide help (albeit to a certain extend). I have no idea on how most members are doing now but if I look at the older topics (end '09 and begin '10) I can see lots of members having difficulties with all kinds of problems. Once again admitting a problem and then talk about it or just get it out there can be immersively relieving.

None of you have to contact me, if you don't want to, don't do it, if you can get proffesional help, do that. But if you just are frustated and want to get your story out just write it off and I'll try to give help as much as I can. I am just offering a handshake it is up to you to accept it or decline it (in which again, declining is very plausable and very much respected).

Once more sorry for coming up with this so radically and out-of-the-blue but I feel like I can and must help...

P.S. Just a recent personal experience:I myself recently had a problem which I couldn't get out of my head, I did not know what to do, that was, until I told a friend about it. I just feel like I can handle it now simply because I told it means I had to make a comprehending story, otherwise my friend wouldn't understand. So I did that, I just organized my mind, what had happened, why did I feel this or that way about it and how did this problem arise? By asking these kind of questions I came up with a crystal clear story, a comprehensive overview of my problem, next, I told my friend about it, he listened but he did not reply to it. That did not matter however because I listened to myself! I just listened to my own overview of this problem and by hearing it I could comprehend it fully! One could turn it upside down shake it around, toss with it and reverse it's order but the image, the overview was absolutely, unprofoundly clear. This way i could distantiate from the problem, I could overlook it! From that perspective things looked entirely different! I did not feel like this problem was anybody's fault anymore, I did not feel saddened about it anymore, I just fel the anger witdrawing...
To solve a problem is to oversee a problem and that is what I managed. With this story I am trying to make it very clear that I nor anyone else in this world is perfect, but to realize you are imperfect and then to know it doesn't matter (since everybody is imperfect) is just...a relief beyond comprehension.

I am trying to make a bootloader that deletes a file at startup. Any moderator or admin, feel free to delte this topic if I am breaking some rule by posting this because my intentions with the bootloader might not fit within the rules (< I don't think my school will like it, hint ^^) I take full responsibilty though. This is what I got so far:
model small
org 7c00h
.data
Name db 'C:\program files\netsupport manager\client32.ini'
.code
lea dx, Name
mov ax,0x7141
int 0x21
times 0x0200-2-($-$$) db 0
dw 0xAA55
Would this work, theaoretically I mean. I don't want to risk messing up my system because of this. Is their a way I could implent a safety measure? Note that I know very little about x86 asm and that this is just what I managed to come up with after some reading on bootloaders and deleting files in asm.