Anyone up for an ASM coding competition?
 

Perhaps can pick a regular / standard routine.. and see who comes up with the fastest or most elegant way of doing it in ASM ?

Maybe some simple rules... like to minimise memory requirement (just to prevent a routine that uses 2 megs of lookup-tables etc..)

What do you coders think ?

I'm in. Gonna get my ass handed to me competing against you guys that have been coding asm since the Amiga days, but I'm sure I'll learn a thing or two.

A memory budget for each challenge would make sense to me.

You may eventually count on me as well.

However you can expect people to not agree on what is the most elegant way of doing something ; what's elegant for some folk may look ugly for another ;)

Great initiative.

I think it should be like we did on amycoders competitions ages ago.
One entry for fastest and one entry for shortest.

Could be interested

Interesting initiative.. I'll probably have to decline though, it's been 20 years since I did any amiga coding ;-)

I'm betting on Leffmann to win.

How much ? :p

I'm interested! I'm more or less in the same situation as alpine9000: I have no chance of competing against many of you, guys, but I'm sure it would be a good learning experience for me :).

Shortest and fastest piece of code (as stated by roomeo) seems a good approach to me.

Sounds fun, although I'd have to learn 68k asm first. :) I do know a little, but at a very basic level, so I'd spend days doing something that others could do in 5 mins..

For hardware specs, it should probably be as limited as possible to keep things simple, like plain A500 KS1.3 with 512kB chip (and probably even tighter restrictions on memory). A plain 68000 also allows for some fun self-modifying code tricks..

Back in the day I always enjoyed reading threads on comp.sys.amiga.programmer where people were trying to squeeze cycles out of C2P algorithms etc. I would definitely be interested, even if my my 680x0 is rusty!

Maybe the contest could come with an archived dev environment setup for someone to install on a vanilla a500/ks1.3 setup in UAE? This could create a good baseline and also get those of us that have never written asm on Amiga a chance to play without wasting too much time setting up the proper dev tools :)

Thanks to DanScott for this great idea! :great

I'm sure that any competition spawned by this thread will make interesting reading for many members here - especially those who, like myself, have some coding experience but have not been involved for a number of years and so do not have the skills to compete.

Also specify system requirements and running DMA (i.e. screen size+depth) though :)

There will be a separate thread for each puzzle or something ? (Like famous threads: conversion capers) :)

Maybe each round we should nominate someone to run it?

Outline the challenge, rules etc.

As far as determining the winner, maybe everyone that submits an entry gets a set number of votes (can't vote for yourself)?

Or if the challenge can me measured by a metric (speed or bytes etc) then I guess it's pretty easy to work out.

I'm excited :-)

Best to await what Dan has in mind, I think ;) Rules will have to be specific and locked if there's to be a competition. Better if it's real-time and generally useful, just asking for thoughts on the best approach or how can this code be sped up.

I started something like this a while back intended to be a set of smaller general problems anyone could run into while programming, but only finished a couple of them so far. It would be plain M68K programming, so anyone familiar with the CPU could join.

But you had more Amiga specific problems in mind, like demo effects or other things related to the Amiga hardware I guess?

I think you'll do much better than me to be honest.

Well, my idea was to take a standard routine type, that most people might have in their "utility.s" file (or similar) to see if anyone can come up with the quickest method. I wasn't thinking of anything particularly large, certainly nothing what would require having a set number of bitplanes & DMA set up etc (as Photon mentioned).

I will have a little think, and see what I can come up with for the first competion task ;)

This is my view on the subject as well.

I'd vote for useful things such as bit strings manipulations, computations such as integer square root, etc.
Not sure it has to be pure 68000 though. Perhaps a few 020+ contests would be good.