Asm-One and Amiga Forever

Hi

I am new to this forum, it looks like this is the ultimate place!
I had an amiga as a child, which we eventually sold, and I made a career in 3d design in the meanwhile. I am generally still interested in this stuff. A group of us also had a demo group (I was the tracker guy), but we really never made anything. We were in The Gathering (Norway) circuits.

So now I am FINALLY into programming on the Amiga (500 / 6800). I do not have much knowledge of programming in assembler, but I have managed to get Asm-One onto my Amiga Forever. I am using Amiga Forever because I think it's more comfortable to learn and try things in a quickly matter like that, but I have bought myself a nice Amiga 500 again.


Ultimately, I want to make my own splash/intro, and maybe trying on a game or just a small demo. If I am totally off here with trying this with assembler, I'd be happy to be routed in the right direction. I know terms of programming, but I am not a code guru.


Anyway, when I am trying to write a code and writing j afting having it assembled, the Asm-One window just exits to workbench instead of showing the result of the code. That was kinda annoying, I think. I am using 1.49 rc2 of Asm-One. Anyone have any experience with this, or know how to solve it?

Thanks, people.


Edit: Actually I am starting out with what seems to be Photon's youtube tutorials.

[Toni Wilen]

http://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p=987159&postcount=2 should answer your question. (Or don't use RTG modes but I really recommend using proper startup code for best compatibility)

Hi Toni. Thanks. Not sure if I got much out of that. I think it got way too much over my head too soon. I am trying to follow this tutorial [ Show youtube player ], but when i write j, it jumps out of the program and back to workbench, instead of waiting for the mouse click call or whatever it might be. I am wondering about what I should do to make it work like it should. I did the exact same as what he did in the movie, but only that the program exits when i press enter after j.

Sorry if I am being n00b or stupid.

[Photon]

These tutorials are made to work on an Amiga 500 with 512k expansion memory and up - or an emulator set to the same, and there's no need to install Workbench or to go into Workbench before starting the assembler.

If you have set up a very nice Workbench environment, some things may cause trouble, such as RTG modes and mouse hacks to change the way menus normally work.

There are many ways now to enhance your Amiga usage in emulators, even beyond the original hardware! For these tutorials, the best setup is a standard "A500 Kick 1.3 Quickstart" with cycle-exact mode, just add a "harddisk directory" to put AsmOne and your sources in.

I've added this info to the first tutorial, please reply if it didn't help but for WinUAE I'm really in the hands of Toni regarding this

Hi chroma123,

Had a dream some 20 years ago to be able to code Amiga assembler but never figured it out. Why not try it out again now... Have bought Amiga Forever now and I'm trying to get Asm-One to work on it.

Originally Posted by chroma123

I do not have much knowledge of programming in assembler, but I have managed to get Asm-One onto my Amiga Forever.

Looks like you were able to - could you please tell me how you did?

Regards from Sweden!

[Hewitson]

Might be worth posting your code.

Originally Posted by bkelkmar

Looks like you were able to - could you please tell me how you did?

I'm not familiar with Amiga Forever but surely it's just a matter of downloading the ADF and booting it?

Originally Posted by bjelkmar

Hi chroma123,

Had a dream some 20 years ago to be able to code Amiga assembler but never figured it out. Why not try it out again now... Have bought Amiga Forever now and I'm trying to get Asm-One to work on it.



Looks like you were able to - could you please tell me how you did?

Regards from Sweden!

Hello there neighbour! You are probably a little older than me, but not that much. I was fiddling around with our amiga 500 25 years ago. I didn't come much longer than playing games on it back then. But Sim City actually had me, so now I work at an architecture office. , being totally in love with city simulations and stuff. Oh my those things spends your time...

Anyway, I totally forgot about this thread. As a matter of fact I was ending up here earlier today while googling, but I didn't realize that I was the creator of this thread before now. Ha ha.

However, I figured out why it wasn't working. Things actually work with asm-one 1.20. Before I used 1.4, and there nothing showed up when I tried what Photon does in tutorial 1.

I feel I am starting to get my head around this, but there is one thing that is yet left to my heavenly unknown imagination, and that is how to create a workspace. In other words, how to setup a directory on the physical harddrive on my computer that I can work on. Read and write the assembler files. I would like to save my files and to keep a consistent working space so that I can develop a demo over time. I am an old tracker, so I am looking forward to the music sections on these tutorials. But there are about 30 tutorials before I come there.

I feel privileged that Toni from WinUAE and Photon is actually answering in this thread. That is cool. Big up!

I just had a breakthrough. Before, I dragged the asm-one lha file into workbench 1.3. That made everything read-only and it was just a bad way to handle files.

Now this is what I did. I downloaded Legacy Amiga Utils Compilations Disks, mentioned here http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=27057 and located here http://cyberpingui.free.fr/zelegacy/. I just loaded the adf file with asm-one, and the save file in asm-one worked! And the file can actually be opened again after closing down the emulator. Woohooo!

[Photon]

See Installing your Software and Data, using Kick+WB 1.3 limits you to Asm-One 1.20 (the special Kick 1.3 version, there are two) or earlier. I recommend Kick+WB 3.1 for everything - on all Amiga setups - it allows you to run software all the way from the oldest programs to the newest.

[Hewitson]

Originally Posted by Photon

I recommend Kick+WB 3.1 for everything - on all Amiga setups - it allows you to run software all the way from the oldest programs to the newest.

Couldn't agree more. Many people seem to think that anything later than 1.3 causes huge incompability problems but that hasn't been my experience at all.

[Photon]

Well it may for some early demos and games that you run directly on real Amigas, but here you run games and demos from Workbench so there is no reason at all to limit yourself - at least that's my opinion. For a gaming machine and just insert floppy and play - 1.3. Or for a demoshow machine where all demos must work and not just 95% - 1.3. But saying 1.3 is generally best, well, you limit yourself in all other arenas I think.

And even when running demos and games directly on real Amigas, 3.1 is more compatible than 2.0 or 3.0. So I think it's a good choice to always use 3.1 and in a few cases when games or demos don't work (usually utilities *never* fail, or if they fail it's because of not >=2.0), you can switch to 1.3 with a kickswitch or softkick if you have an ACA card or similar.

[Hewitson]

Originally Posted by Photon

And even when running demos and games directly on real Amigas, 3.1 is more compatible than 2.0 or 3.0.

Would you mind elaborating on that?

[Photon]

Mainly, it's just from running lots of A500 and A1200 games and demos and making the Amigas into game/demo machine setups. When exactly all of your selection simply must work, you find out what is needed to run them all.

On A500, you keep returning to 1.3, with 3.1 as second best and very compatible. 1.2 and 2.0 is just not an option to run other than trackloaded demos and games. 1.2 will simply not boot many DOS disks, and 2.0 had differences in system interrupts that messed up system-interrupt based tracker music players enough to stop the whole demo, and the system occupied more fastmem after boot, whereas 3.1 uses less than 2.0. Kick 2.0 made some demos and games not fit in 512k+512k slowmem.

On A1200, there were much fewer incompatibilities to begin with, because you're usually not running games or demos from DOS disks, nor really from trackloaded disks. Usually you install a harddisk and run everything as files from that.

That said, there is very little difference between 3.0 and 3.1, and compatibility is already very good, so that the number of non-working games and demos is MUCH smaller.

The trouble I've had is mostly from the games that install to harddisk from floppy, and they're not many. But again, you want to play a certain game, it must work and a few would only work by using 3.1.

If you have kick 3.0, note that you can still install WB 3.1, which will allow you to install the newest versions of libs and devices, which is not required for a stock A1200 but will help with expanded Amigas. I didn't know this until I learned it from trying ClassicWB!

Finally I got my shit together and I now post the instructions of how I got this to work:

How to set up (Amiga Forever) Amiga 500 plus with HD running asmone and photon’s tutorial

Photon’s tutorial on Amiga Harware Programming is available here:
[ Show youtube player ]

To play around yourself you need to get an Amiga emulation and install asmone. This is how I did it.

Download asm-one v 1.20 from this link:
http://www.tfa.org/documents/ftp.html

Place it in a folder on your hard drive (Amiga/applications for example)

Extract asmonev120.lha file with Easy 7-zip software for example. Available from here:
http://www.e7z.org/

Buy and download Amiga Forever from here:
https://www.amigaforever.com/

Create an Amiga 500 Plus with Hard Disc:
* start Amiga Forever
* select Systems tab
* right-klick Amiga 500 Plus and select Create a copy
* edit the copy and rename
* select Media tab
* select Add
- Hard Disc Image File -> Create Blank.. -> 20 MB (for example) -> Press OK
* select Workbench 1.35 (hard disc image) from Disk in Built-in Boot
* select Add
- Directory and browse to your folder for source files (Amiga/sources/ on your hard drive for example) -> Press OK -> Press OK
* Press OK a final time to create the new computer

Run asmone from your Amiga 500 Plus with HD:
* select your newly created computer in Amiga Forever -> press Play button
* start Workbench1.3
* start Shell
* go to applications folder:
cd applications:
* start asmone
asmonev120/ASM-One_OS1.3

DONE! Follow instructions in tutorial.

[Photon]

Asm-One V1.20 was the very last version that supported Kick/WB 1.3 (by way of a separate binary in the archive).

If you are within a limited environment where you can't use Kick/WB 3.1, you may have to use these older assemblers. (I don't know that this is relevant for Amiga Forever, though!)

Other limitations could crop up for various assemblers that were not written for certain environments, such as Workbench. It seems it was just not how these were used, and one reason was maximizing memory and avoiding conflicts.

That is, some integrated editors f.ex. might not be compatible with some resolutions beyond 640x512, or cause trouble with left-click/floating menus - or just custom WB stuff added in startup-sequence at one point. The latest Asm-One/Asm-Pro should work from Workbench?

My tutorials should work with all Asm-One/Asm-Pro versions. If a specific episode causes an assembly error message, please comment on Youtube. Normally it will just be an assembler directive that differs slightly and the Assembler will assemble the source "binary perfect"!

Note that you may have trouble assembling the first episodes when Workbench is running until the SECTION statement episode - because I'm showing how instructions end up in memory as binary words.

But after that, environment shouldn't matter.

You can also try the AsmTwo beta from my site, which I made because latest Asm-One/Asm-Pro had compatibility issues on some of my Amigas (guru at memory allocation, debugger not working). It should work with any Kickstart/Workbench environment, but the might will not work with horizontal resolutions > 640 as that would likely make the editor use libraries and be slow instead of fast.